Workers on T-Mobile’s social media customer support staff, who reply to buyer questions, feedback, and complaints on websites like Twitter and Facebook, are attempting to start out a union. On Wednesday, they announced the creation of the “T-Force Social Care Alliance,” posting a letter tying their determination to pay cuts, layoffs, and administration’s lack of response to workers elevating considerations about these points.

The letter says that T-Mobile has minimize month-to-month bonuses for T-Force (the provider’s name for its social media support team), as a substitute changing them with “micro-raises” and an annual bonus, which the alliance claims there are only a few particulars about. According to the letter, staff could find yourself with hundreds of {dollars} much less per yr — assuming they even get to maintain their jobs. It additionally references the waves of layoffs the corporate has been finishing up over the previous two years, a few of which affected T-Force staff.

“We believe T-Mobile’s senior leadership stopped prioritizing the best interest of its front-line employees,” mentioned Tyler Roquemore, a member of the Alliance, in an e-mail to The Verge. “The primary purpose of forming this union is to protect ourselves from further pay cuts and layoffs during unprecedented economic hardships; which may include collective bargaining contracts.”

TSCA isn’t at present negotiating with administration, or formally submitting for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board, says Roquemore. “While we would like T-Mobile management to recognize TSCA as a legitimate worker’s union, we are prepared for retaliation. We’re confident with the support we have internally and externally that we will succeed very soon.”

The group does understand that it gained’t be simple; as a report from More Perfect Union notes, the corporate hasn’t traditionally been pleasant to staff attempting to prepare, even earning a reprimand from the federal government for its unlawful office guidelines that instructed workers they couldn’t doc unsafe working circumstances or talk about wages and phrases of employment. The T-Force staff are additionally decentralized, which could make it more durable to recruit new supporters — although Roquemore tells me that members of the staff are “digital media experts and are creatively utilizing multiple methods of technology to communicate and organize.”

Despite the wave of office unionizations at tech firms, customer service jobs, and even other carrier shops, the TSCA is heading into principally uncharted waters. There are few, if any, different high-profile examples of social media buyer assist groups unionizing, and the method of organizing, voting for a union, and bargaining with administration will be lengthy and tedious — which makes the method particularly difficult in industries with a excessive turnover price, like customer support.

Roquemore believes the alliance is as much as the duty, saying, “T-Force employees are no strangers to long, drawn-out processes via their day-to-day jobs.” Even attending to the purpose of creating Wednesday’s announcement took “months of hard work planning and organizing,” in response to Roquemore, so there’s already a little bit of a case examine.