Google workers form a union of 226 card-bearing members: report

More than 200 Google workers have formed a union aimed at pushing the technology titan to live up to its previous motto: “Do not be evil.”

The group’s leaders have named the Alphabet Workers Union, named after Google’s parent company, 226 card-bearing members who are fed up with bosses. They expressed their concern about discrimination, harassment and other issues in the workplace.

“Every time workers organize to demand change, Alphabet executives make promising promises and do the bare minimum in the hope of putting workers down,” said Parul Koul and Chewy Shaw, Google software engineers who serve as executive and vice presidents. of the union serve, in a New York Times opened Monday. “It is not enough.”

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The union effort follows years of activism by employees at Google, which has caught fire because they have not addressed internal issues such as sexual misconduct and that their workers who speak out are taking revenge. And experts say it could inspire workers at other technology companies to follow suit.

“It’s a big shot over the bow, not just for Google, but also for Silicon Valley,” Dan Ives, Wedbush Securities, told The Post. “It can have a huge ripple effect with all the dissatisfaction we see from the employees’ base of who’s who of technology.”

The Alphabet Workers Union is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America and represents a small fraction of the approximately 120,000 employees of the Silicon Valley company. But it is the stated mission of union leaders that they hope to include alphabet workers from all walks of life – ‘from bus drivers to programmers, from salespeople to housekeepers’ – that makes it one to keep an eye on.

Ticker	Safety	Last	Alter	Alter%
GOOGL	ALPHABET INC.	1 726.13	-26.51	-1.51%

“We are not talking about a monolithic demographic,” said corporate governance expert Eleanor Bloxham. “We’re talking about engineers working with less skilled workers.”

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Bloxham calls the union a ‘monumental achievement’ and says it could set an example for workers at other companies such as Facebook and Amazon to follow because they ‘see how it can be done’.

CWA, which has been quietly working with Google staff for more than a year, certainly hopes to replicate its success elsewhere. Alphabet’s union “will be an excellent example for other workers at other companies who may be interested in doing something similar,” CWA communications director Beth Allen told The Post.

Allen did not want to name specific companies, but she said there are currently many different organizations in technology and elsewhere.

But Silicon Valley has a rocky history of union organization. Amazon, for example, has been waging an ongoing battle against trade unionism with a November motherboard report revealing that the e-commerce titan has hired spies from the legendary Pinkerton agency to monitor organizational efforts in Europe.

Uber, meanwhile, has fought tooth and nail to make sure it does not have to recognize its drivers in California as full-time employees.

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And the National Labor Relations Board ruled last month that Google had illegally monitored and subsequently fired several workers who were protesting its policies and trying to regulate a union.

“Our employees have protected labor rights that support us,” said Kara Silverstein, Google’s director of human operations. “But as we have always done, we will continue to engage directly with all of our employees.”

One of the goals of the group is to address the inequality between employees and contractors, who pay less money and receive less benefits even though they do exactly the same work.

“They are more likely to be black or brown – a segregated employment system that keeps half the workforce in second-class roles,” Koul and Shaw wrote in their headline.

They criticized Google’s work with the U.S. Department of Defense and ‘oppressive’ governments in places like China, where the company scrapped plans to launch a censored search engine in response to internal activism.

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They also quoted the dismissal in December of Timnit Gebru, a researcher on black artificial intelligence, who said she was fired after criticizing Google’s diversity efforts. Google disputes Gebru’s report on the ordeal, saying it has resigned.

“Our union will work to ensure that workers know what they are working on, and that they can do their jobs at a fair wage, without fear of abuse, retaliation or discrimination,” Koul and Shaw wrote.

Despite the proliferation of dirty laundry, Google’s union effort may actually be positive for recruitment, as some workers will move to a company where they have a more formal voice, John Freeman, an analyst at CFRA Research, said the union well .

‘Our history is that trade unions are fighting for people who are being unfairly exploited. That’s not exactly it, ”Freeman said. “It’s more that employees want a bigger voice in the kind of non-monetary things they really care about.”

Shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet Shares fell just 1.6 percent on Monday afternoon, trading at $ 1,724.64.