More than 200 US Google employees form a workers’ union
More than 200 Google employees in the United States have formed a workers’ union, the first group at a big tech company to do so as the industry faces a reckoning over years of unchecked power.
The elected leaders of the Alphabet Workers Union announced the organization in a New York Times opinion piece on Monday, saying they aimed to ensure employees work at a fair wage, without fear of abuse, retaliation or discrimination.
The union is open to all US and Canadian workers at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, including full-time employees as well as temporary workers, vendors, and other contractors. These unofficial employees make up an enormous “shadow” workforce at Google, outnumbering direct Google employees by around 135,000 to 115,000. In 2019, a small group of such contractors formed a union in Pittsburgh.
“We’re building on years of organizing efforts at Google to create a formal structure for workers,” the union leaders wrote, adding that so far 226 employees had signed union cards with the Communications Workers of America.
The group is forging a unique path to organizing – it will not be seeking ratification through the US labor regulator the National Labor Relations Board, as is typical. Instead it will form a “minority union”, which means it will not necessarily have legally protected rights to action like collective bargaining but will be able to include a wider range of workers, including contractors.
Monday’s announcement comes after years of worker activism and internal protests. In 2018, workers staged a major walkout in Google campuses globally over the alleged mishandling of sexual harassment allegations. Also that year, Googlers wrote public letters denouncing the company’s role in building a censored search engine in China – a project that was later abandoned.
In 2019, Google employees wrote a public letter to the company calling on it to cut all its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Workers also signed a petition condemning a cloud computing contract Google had with US Customs and Border Protection over the agency’s role in separating immigrant families at the border. The treatment of temporary and contract workers at Google has also been a flashpoint for employees. Hundreds of employees signed a letter in solidarity with such workers in 2019.
And in December 2020, workers demanded an apology from Google after Timnit Gebru, a prominent Black researcher in artificial intelligence, said she was fired after criticizing the company’s diversity efforts.
Alex Gorowara, a member of the Alphabet union, said he had found himself disillusioned by the company’s departure from its former ethos in the five years he has worked there.
“We have seen Google lose its ethics over time – and at the same time, it has become more hostile to people trying to conduct themselves ethically,” he told the Guardian. “We have seen retaliation, we have seen careers derailed – this is in response to that.”
In a statement, Google’s director of human resources, Kara Silverstein, said the company had “always worked hard to create a supportive and rewarding workplace” for its employees.
“Of course our employees have protected labor rights that we support,” she said. “But as we’ve always done, we’ll continue engaging directly with all our employees.”
Google has been under fire from the National Labor Relations Board, which has accused the company of unlawfully questioning several workers who were then terminated for protesting against company policies and trying to organize a union. Google has said it is confident it acted legally.
The unionization effort is one of many challenges Google faces in the coming year. The company is battling three antitrust lawsuits that argue it has established a monopoly using unfair business practices, as lawmakers question aspects of its model including paying platforms to prioritize the Google search engine and its acquisition of competitors in the advertising space.
Chewy Shaw, an engineer at Google in the San Francisco Bay Area and the vice-chair of the union’s leadership council, told the Times the union was needed to sustain pressure on management so that workers could force changes on workplace issues.
“Our goals go beyond the workplace questions of ‘ Are people getting paid enough?’ Our issues are going much broader,” he said. “It is a time where a union is an answer to these problems.”