January 4, 2021

Google Employees Launch Union

By Lillian Searles

Hundreds of employees at Google have launched a union.

 

Announced Monday morning, the new union called the Alphabet Workers Union after Google’s parent company, Alphabet, will be run by employees and open both to full-time workers and contractors at the tech giant.

 

The union, launched with more than 200 members, was organized in secret and elected its leadership last month. The group is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a union that represents workers in telecommunications and media in the United States and Canada.

 

In response to the union effort, Google pledged to engage with workers.

“We’ve always worked hard to create a supportive and rewarding workplace for our workforce,” said Kara Silverstein, Google’s director of people operations. 

 

“Of course our employees have protected labour rights that we support. But as we’ve always done, we’ll continue engaging directly with all our employees.”

 

Unlike a traditional union, which demands that an employer come to the bargaining table to agree on a contract, the Alphabet Workers Union is a so-called minority union that represents a fraction of the company’s more than 260,000 full-time employees and contractors. Workers said it was primarily an effort to give structure and longevity to activism at Google, rather than to negotiate for a contract.

 

The union’s creation follows years of rising employee tensions at Google over the company’s business and operational decisions and the company’s handling of sexual misconduct claims, the last of which resulted in a massive employee protest. In 2018, more than 20,000 employees staged a walkout to protest how the company handled sexual harassment. Others have opposed business decisions that they deemed unethical, such as developing artificial intelligence for the Defense Department and providing technology to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

 

Many tech workers shunned them, arguing that labour groups were focused on issues like wages — not a top concern in the high-earning industry — and were not equipped to address their concerns about ethics and the role of technology in society.

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