A group of Google engineers and other workers announced on Monday that they have formed a union that creates a rare foothold for the labor movement in the technology industry.
About 225 employees at Google and its parent company Alphabet are the first paid members of the Alphabet Workers Union. It represents a fraction of Alphabet’s workforce, far less than the threshold needed to gain formal recognition as a collective bargaining group in the US.
But the new union, which is affiliated with the larger Communications Workers of America, says it will serve as a “structure that ensures Google workers can actively insist on real change in the enterprise.” The members say they not only want a vote on wages, benefits and protection from discrimination and harassment, but also broader ethical questions about how Google does its business.
The trade union campaign is the latest sign from employees who do not believe that the company is living up to its confessional ideals, as expressed in the original slogan “Do not be bad”.
Google said on Monday that it had sought to create a supportive and rewarding workplace, but suggested it would not negotiate directly with the union.
“Of course, our employees have protected labor rights that support us,” reads a statement from Kara Silverstein, the company’s director of human operations. “But as we have always done, we will continue to engage directly with all of our employees.”
Unionization campaigns have yet to gain much traction among elite technology workers, who receive hefty salaries and other benefits, such as free food and commuting to work. But workplace activism at Google and other major technology companies has grown over the past few years as employees call for better treatment of sexual harassment and discrimination, and to avoid harmful use of the products they help build and sell.
Many employees saw the power of their workplace activism in 2018 when an internal outcry led Google to abandon its work by providing artificial intelligence services for conflict zones to the Pentagon. Later in 2018, thousands of Google employees step down to argue about how the company dealt with sexual misconduct against managers.
Google’s software engineer Chewy Shaw, who was elected to the new union’s executive council, said he and others decided to form the group after seeing colleagues express their roles for their activism.
“We want a counter-force to protect workers who speak,” Shaw said.
The latest examples came last month when leading researcher on AI ethics, Timnit Gebru, said she had been fired about a research article that Google wanted to unleash; and while a federal labor agency filed a complaint in which he accused the company of spying on employees and firing some of them during an effort to organize a union in 2019. Google has denied the allegations in the case, which is scheduled for a trial in April.
The union’s first members include engineers, as well as sales associates, administrative assistants and the workers who test self-driving vehicles at the Waymo Alphabet Motor Division. Many work at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, while others are in offices in Massachusetts, New York and Colorado.
“One of the reasons why it took a while for workers to get to this point is because the leaders of these companies did a good job of convincing workers that they were the most benevolent people they would provide,” he said. a kind of paternalistic model, ”said Beth Allen, director of communications at the CWA.
“It’s come a long way,” Allen said, but workers increasingly realized they “need to come together to build strength for themselves and have a voice in what’s going on.”
The National Labor Relations Board usually recognizes petitions to form new unions when they gain the interest of at least 30% of employees in a given location or job classification in the US; a majority of the workers involved must then vote to form one. Alphabet has a worldwide workforce of about 130,000.
Allen said the Alphabet Workers Union does not currently plan to pursue official recognition as a collective bargaining group. Instead, she said it would work similarly to unions in the public sector in states that do not allow public employees to bargain collectively.
“We want to get direct legal representation, but the focus right now is that we will not be dependent on it,” Shaw said.