Google’s contract workers were banned from discussing their wages, and one was suspended for his labor activism, according to a complaint by the Alphabet Workers Union.
On a Thursday, filing with the National Labor Relations Board, the union accused Google supplier Adecco of violating United States labor laws by trying to silence employees. Management prohibits employees of a data center in South Carolina from discussing their payment, according to the complaint. Managers also suspended a data technician because of a pro-union post on Facebook, according to the union.
The union filed a complaint against Google’s father Alphabet Inc., like Adecco’s units, claims that the Internet giant is a “joint employer” – a company with sufficient control over a group of workers to be legally responsible for its treatment. Google and Adecco Group AG did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The technician, Shannon Wait, said in an interview that her Facebook post explained that she had joined the union to take on the degrading treatment of outsourced employees, such as the refusal to replace lost water bottles. Google’s direct employees get new ones when they need them, she said.
Wait said he is working full-time during the pandemic, performing physically strenuous tasks to maintain the servers on which Google depends. “We are the backbone of Google,” she said. “We are working hard.” The day after posting her message, she said, she was called to a virtual meeting with management and informed that she was being suspended and investigated as a “security risk”.
The Wait’s Labor Board complaint is the first filed by the Alphabet Workers Union since the organization released publicly last month. AWU, an affiliate of Communications Workers of America, has so far enrolled around 800 Google employees and contractors as members. The group is not seeking collective bargaining with Alphabet’s management, which under US labor laws difficult for contract workers to obtain. Instead it plans to use collective actions and protests to force changes at the company, which in recent years has been stirred up by worker revolts over issues such as military contracts and sexual harassment. The treatment of outsourced and self-employed workers, who in 2018 has become the majority of Alphabet’s global workforce, it has been another topic of long controversy.
Google software engineer Parul Koul, president of the union, said Wait’s experience reflects a “massive double standard” between the treatment of Alphabet’s direct employees and the contractors who work side by side with them. “They have a responsibility to ensure that people who are doing mission-critical work for the company are treated fairly,” she said.