A group of Google engineers and other workers announced Monday that they have formed a union, creating a rare fulcrum for the labor movement in the technology industry.
About 225 employees at Google and the parent company Alphabet are the first contributing members of the Alphabet Workers Union. These represent a fraction of Alphabet’s workforce, far from the threshold needed to gain formal recognition as a collective bargaining group in the United States.
But the new union, which will be affiliated with America’s largest communications workers, says it will serve as a “structure to ensure Google workers can actively make real changes to the company.” Its members say they want more voice not only on salaries, benefits and protection against discrimination and harassment, but also on broader ethical questions about how Google conducts its business.
The unionization campaign is the last signal of the employees who do not think that the company respects the ideals professed, as it is expressed in its original slogan “Don’t be bad”.
Google said Monday it was trying to create a supportive and rewarding job, but suggested it would not negotiate directly with the union.
“Of course, our employees have protected the labor rights we support,” said Kara Silverstein, the company’s director of human operations. “But as we have always done, we will continue to engage directly with all our employees.”
Historically, unionization campaigns have failed to gain much traction among elite tech workers, who receive heavy wages and other benefits, such as free food and commuter rides. But workplace activism at Google and other big tech companies has grown in recent years as employees demand better management of harassment and sex discrimination and avoid harmful uses of the products they help build and sell. .
Many employees began to see the power of their activism in the workplace in 2018, when an internal outcry led Google to quit its job, providing the Pentagon with artificial intelligence services for conflict zones. Later in 2018, thousands of Google employees left to protest the way the company handled allegations of sexual misconduct against executives.
Google software engineer Chewy Shaw, who was elected to the new union’s executive board, said he and others decided to form the group after seeing colleagues expelled from their activism roles.
“We want to have an opposing force to protect the talking workers,” Shaw said.
The latest examples came last month, when prominent AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru says she was fired over a research paper from which Google wanted to break away; and while a federal labor agency filed a complaint accusing the company of spying on employees and then firing some of them during the 2019 effort to organize a union. Google has denied the allegations in the case, which is scheduled for a hearing in April.
The first members of the union include engineers, as well as sales associates, administrative assistants and workers who test vehicles with automatic driving in the Alphabet Waymo car division. Many work at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, while others are at offices in Massachusetts, New York and Colorado.
“One of the reasons it took the workers some time to get to this point is that the leaders of these companies did a good job of convincing the workers that it was these benevolent people who would provide them with a kind of paternalistic model.” “Said Beth Allen, director of communications at CWA.
“That took them a long way,” Allen said, but workers are increasingly realizing that they need to “come together and build their strength and have a voice in what’s going on.” .
The National Labor Relations Committee typically recognizes petitions for the formation of new unions when they receive interest from at least 30% of employees in a particular location or job classification in the US; the majority of affected workers must then vote to form one. Alphabet has a global workforce of approximately 130,000.
Allen said the Alphabet Workers’ Union did not currently intend to seek official recognition as a collective bargaining group. Instead, she said it would work similarly to public sector unions in states that do not allow public employees to bargain collectively.
“We would like to get direct legal representation, but the emphasis is that we will not depend on it,” Shaw said.