Announced Monday morning, the Alphabet Workers' Union will be run by employees and open both to full-time workers and contractors at the tech giant.."The first union at a major tech company by and for all tech workers. We will elect representatives, we will make decisions democratically, we will pay dues, and we will hire skilled organizers to ensure all workers at Google know they can work with us if they actually want to see their company reflect their values.
While the pandemic made it more challenging to hold those meetings face-to-face, he said, the shift to remote work, in some ways, made it easier to organize. But the Google workers have opted for a third approach that, at least for now, does not anticipate formal recognition, said Beth Allen, communications director at CWA. That's because traditional collective bargaining agreements"almost always exclude contractors," Allen said, which was a nonstarter for many of the Google organizers.
The union's formation comes after years of rising employee tensions at Google over the company's business and operational decisions, including its work with the defense sector, plans for a censored search engine in China, and the company's handling of sexual misconduct claims, the last of which resulted in a massive employee protest. The union's demands hit on many of those issues.