South Carolina, the nation’s least unionized state, is back in the spotlight within the organized union movement.
This time, Boeing Co. is not the center of attention.
But another familiar name is.
Google and parent company Alphabet Inc. ended up receiving a federal complaint earlier this month after a Berkeley County data center technician was suspended from her employment contract for violating workplace rules. Also cited in the complaint is Adecco Group, a global recruiting company that hired it through its technology services business Modis E&T LLC.
The process with the National Council for Labor Relations is a milestone in at least one aspect: it is the first public legal salvo from a new work-affiliated organization that some 230 Alphabet workers launched last month to push for bottom-up changes on the internet giant.
The group’s title is simple and to the point: Alphabet Workers Union.
And while it is partnering with a well-established work organization – Communications Workers of America Local 1400 – it will not seek to engage in collective bargaining with management over salaries, benefits and other issues, primarily because some members are outsourced who, legally, they are not company employees.
Instead, it plans to rely on protests and other actions to bring ethical issues to the negotiating table.
“Our company’s motto used to be ‘Don’t be bad’. An organized workforce will help us live up to that, “said the group on its website.
Google has invested more than $ 2.3 billion in its 500-acre data center in Berkeley County since 2007. The company and an employment agency are facing a federal labor complaint about a suspended worker. Archive / AP
Last week, another 600 employees and contractors had joined the activist effort.
It is unclear how many of them strike the clock in the operation of the South Carolina data center, a high-tech, highly secure 500-acre campus near Highway 52, where the streets have fun names like Android Alley and Reboot Road. About three years ago, Google announced a $ 600 million expansion of the site, bringing its total investment in Lowcountry to about $ 2.4 billion since 2007.
Piping up
For years, the base of Silicon Valley companies, including distant Googlers in places like Berkeley County, has rarely or never raised a peep about how and where their bread gets buttered.
Some are breaking ranks and breaking the silence.
At Alphabet, workers have openly attacked the top in recent years, whether for pursuing military arms contracts or protecting executives accused of misconduct. A recent controversy went viral in December, when a Google scientist said she was fired after refusing to remove or withdraw her name and affiliation from an artificial intelligence research article.
Another source of concern has been the treatment of hired workers, who have exceeded the number of internal payrolls for several years. They are known as “TVCs”, short for temporary workers, suppliers and contractors.
The first labor complaint by the Alphabet Workers’ Union focuses on one of them. Shannon Wait’s LinkedIn profile shows that she earned a bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both in history, both from the College of Charleston. His position at Modis, where he worked for about two years, is “Data Technician I.”
“I perform hardware operations and machine infrastructure maintenance in a Google data center,” Wait wrote on LinkedIn. “When exchanging various computer components, I maintain Google’s servers. It is my personal responsibility to comply with all Google data security requirements, which protect customer and user privacy. These actions benefit users on all platforms on the Google, allowing for a smooth Internet experience. “
Labor intensive
A lawyer for Communication Workers filed a complaint against Alphabet, Adecco and Modis, alleging that they violated federal labor laws by prohibiting workers from discussing wages and retaliating against Wait. The lawsuit and subsequent reports said she was suspended in the week of January 25 after talking to a colleague about paying bonuses, complaining about working conditions and expressing support for the new union on social media.
According to AWU, she also said that daily repairs doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic at the Moncks Corner data center, raising potential security concerns.
In an interview with Bloomberg News, which was the first to report the complaint, Wait said he posted a message on Facebook to explain why he joined the fledgling movement of labor activists – to clarify how contract workers are treated compared to employees that are paid by Google or your parent.
Damaged water bottles are a small example: they are not replaced by outsourced help, but are for everyone else, according to Wait.
“These are the conditions we face as TVCs – we get paid less, we get fired when necessary and we often don’t have access to safe and transparent working conditions,” she said in a statement on the AWU website. “Alphabet and Google can do better to ensure that all workers, including their contractors, are treated fairly. Google became a trillion dollar company last year. They can afford to treat us well. “
Google software engineer Parul Koul, who is the union’s executive chairman, described the company’s employment system as “segregated” and “two-tiered”.
“I want other TVCs to see this and know that they can appeal if they see something illegal or unethical in their workplace,” she said in prepared comments.
When the new union membership was announced in early January, a senior Google executive said that online research and the advertising giant supports the “protected labor rights” of all its workers and that “it will continue to get directly involved” with them, according to Reuters. The company did not respond to a request for comment last week.