Hundreds of employees at Google and its parent, Alphabet (GOOGL), have introduced a union, which is a rare step in the technology industry and represents the biggest and most organized challenge currently at the company’s top leadership.
Announced Monday morning, the Alphabet Workers’ Union will be staffed and open to both full-time employees and contractors of the technology company.
Historic Progress
“This is history,” said Dylan Baker, Google’s software engineer. “The first union in the big tech company is all technology professionals. We will elect representatives, we will make democratic decisions, we will pay money, and we will hire skilled promoters to make sure all Google employees know they can work with us if they want to see their company show their prices.”
The program was launched by more than 200 members, according to the New York Times the group published Monday morning. A total of 226 union members signed union cards with Communications Workers of America, one of the largest trade unions in the country.
The unions can be confirmed by a coalition with the majority of the workplace voting in favor of one of the elections elected by the National Labor Relations Board. Alternatively, according to the NLRB, a union may be voluntarily recognized by an employer if sufficient employees indicate that they would like the union to negotiate with them.
“We have always worked hard to create a supportive and rewarding work environment for our employees,” Kara Silverstein, Google’s director of human resources, said in a statement to CNN Business. “Certainly our workers have protected the rights of the workers we support. But as we always do, we will continue to communicate directly with all our employees.”
How Will This Impact The Work Place?
The formation of the union comes after years of growing labor disputes over Google’s business and operational decisions, including its operations with the defense industry, China’s search engine programs, and the company’s handling of sexual misconduct claims, which ultimately led to widespread workers’ protests. The demands of the union have hit many of those issues.
“For too long, thousands of us at Google – and in other companies under the Alphabet, Google’s parent company – have been fired by our authorities, by management,” wrote staff members in the Times. “Our managers have worked with oppressive governments around the world. They have developed intelligence technology to be used by the Department of Defense and benefited from advertisements by a hateful group. They have failed to make the necessary changes to address our detention problems.
The editors spoke in particular about Timnit Gebru, a leading AI researcher who recently left Google after criticizing the company’s diversity efforts – creating complaints about Google’s performance.
Some staff members who have raised their voices in the past have been cut off, in some cases leading to complaints from the NLRB. In December, the NLRB accused Google of violating the law by allegedly firing two employees on purpose.
