A group of Google engineers and other workers announced Monday that they had formed a union, creating a rare fulcrum for the technology industry labor movement.
Approximately 225 employees of Google and its parent company Alphabet are the first members to pay Alphabet Workers Union dues. They represent a fraction of Alphabet’s workforce, far from the threshold needed to gain formal recognition as a collective bargaining group in the U.S.
But the new union, which will be affiliated with America’s major communications workers, says it will serve as a “structure that ensures Google workers can actively drive real change in the company.” Its members say they want to have more of a voice not only about wages, benefits and protections against discrimination and harassment, but also broader ethical issues about how Google conducts its business.
The unionization campaign is the last sign of employees who do not believe that the company meets its professed ideals, as expressed in its original slogan “Don’t be evil”.
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 a statement from Kara Silverstein, the company’s director of people operations. “But, as we have always done, we will continue to work directly with all of our employees.”
Historically, unionization campaigns have not been able to attract much force among elite tech workers, who receive heavy wages and other benefits, such as free food and shuttle trips to work. 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 workplace activism in 2018 when an internal outcry caused Google to quit its job by providing the Pentagon with artificial intelligence services for conflict zones. Later, in 2018, thousands of Google employees left to protest how the company handled allegations of sexual misconduct against executives.
Google software engineer Chewy Shaw, who has been elected to the new union’s executive board, said he and others decided to form the group after seeing colleagues removed from their roles for their activism.
“We want to have a buttress to protect speaking workers,” Shaw said.
The latest examples came last month, when Timnit Gebru, a prominent AI ethics researcher, said she was fired. about a search document that Google wanted to disassociate with; and how a federal employment agency filed a complaint accusing the company of spying on employees and then firing some of them during a 2019 effort to organize a union. Google has denied the allegations in the case, which is scheduled for an April hearing.
Among the first members of the union are engineers, as well as commercial collaborators, administrative assistants and workers testing vehicles with autonomous driving in the Alphabet Waymo automotive division. Many work at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, while others work at offices in Massachusetts, New York and Colorado.
“One of the reasons workers have taken so long to get to this point is because the leaders of these companies did a good job of convincing the workers that it was these benevolent people who had to provide them, a kind of paternalistic model. , ”Said Beth Allen, CWA’s director of communications.
“That went a long way for them,” Allen said, but workers have increasingly realized they need to “come together and build power for themselves and have a voice in what’s going on.”
The National Labor Relations Board typically recognizes requests to form new unions when they gain interest from at least 30% of employees in a particular job location or classification in the U.S.; the majority of affected workers will have to vote to form one. Alphabet has a global workforce of about 130,000 workers.
Allen said the Alphabet Workers Union has no plans to pursue official recognition as a collective bargaining group. Instead, he said it will work similarly to public sector unions in states that do not allow public employees to bargain collectively.
“We would love to get direct legal representation, but the focus right now is that we won’t depend on that,” Shaw said.