A group of Google engineers and other workers announced on Monday that they had formed a union, creating a rare base for the labor movement in the technology industry.
About 225 employees of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, are the first paying members of the Alphabet Workers’ Union. They represent a fraction of Alphabet’s workforce, well below the threshold required for formal recognition as a collective bargaining group in the U.S.
But the new union, which will be affiliated with the largest Communication Workers of America, says it will serve as a “structure that ensures that Google employees can make real changes in the company”. Its members say they want more voice not just about wages, benefits and protections against discrimination and harassment, but also broader ethical issues about how Google conducts its business ventures.
The unionization campaign is the latest sign of employees who do not believe that the company is fulfilling its professed ideals, as expressed in its original slogan “Don’t be bad”.
Google said on Monday that it tried to create a workplace that would support and reward it, but suggested that it would not negotiate directly with the union.
“Of course, our employees protected the labor rights we support,” said Kara Silverstein, director of personnel operations for the company. “But, as we always have, we will continue to engage directly with all of our employees.”
Unionization campaigns have historically not been able to gain much traction among elite tech workers, who receive high wages and other perks like free food and bus trips to work. But workplace activism at Google and other major technology companies has grown in recent years, as employees call for better treatment of sexual harassment and discrimination and avoid the harmful use of products that are helping to build and sell .
Many employees began to see the power of their activism in the workplace in 2018, when an internal outcry prompted Google to abandon its work of providing the Pentagon with artificial intelligence services for conflict zones. Later, in 2018, thousands of Google employees left to protest how the company handled allegations of sexual misconduct against executives.
Google software engineer Chewy Shaw, who was elected to the new union’s executive board, said he and others decided to form the group after seeing their colleagues removed from office because of their activism.
“We want to have a counterforce to protect the workers who are demonstrating,” said Shaw.
The most recent examples came last month, when prominent AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru said she was fired about a research article that Google wanted to disassociate from; and how a federal labor agency filed a complaint accusing the company of spying on employees and firing some of them during a 2019 effort to organize a union. Google denied the charges in the case, which is scheduled for a hearing in April.
The first members of the union include engineers, as well as salespeople, administrative assistants and workers who test autonomous vehicles in Alphabet’s automotive division, Waymo. Many work at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, while others are in offices in Massachusetts, New York and Colorado.
“One of the reasons it took workers a while to get to this point is because the leaders of these companies did a good job of convincing workers that they were benevolent people who would support them, a kind of paternalistic model,” said Beth Allen, director of communications for CWA.
“It helped them a lot,” said Allen, but workers have increasingly realized that they need to “come together and build power for themselves and have a say in what is going on.”
The National Labor Relations Board typically recognizes petitions to form new unions when they obtain the interest of at least 30% of employees in a particular location or job classification in the United States; the majority of affected workers must vote to form one. Alphabet has a global workforce of approximately 130,000.
Allen said the Alphabet Workers Union does not currently plan to seek official recognition as a collective bargaining group. Instead, she said it will work similarly to public sector unions in states that do not allow public officials to bargain collectively.
“We would love to get direct legal representation, but the focus now is that we will not depend on it,” said Shaw.