Google employees have announced the formation of the first company-wide union Monday, The Hill reported.
Over 200 employees have banded together to create the Alphabet Workers Union, named after Alphabet, Google’s parent company, according to The Hill. For the past year, employees have been working in secret to form the union, New York Times reported.
Google workers announce plans to unionize
“The Alphabet Workers Union will be open to all employees and contractors at Google’s parent company. Its goal will be to tackle ongoing issues like pay disparity, retaliation, and controversial govt contracts.”
https://t.co/7iEUQFXlhQ— Amit Paranjape (@aparanjape) January 4, 2021
“We are joining together — temps, vendors, contractors, and full-time employees — to create a unified worker voice,” Parul Koul and Chewy Shaw, executive chair and vice chair of the Alphabet Workers Union wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times Monday.
While Google has seen unions on a smaller scale in the past, such as cafeteria workers or contractors, the Alphabet Workers Union is the first company-wide union, according to The Hill. The union was created to meet employee’s growing demands for employees to “know what they’re working on, and can do their work at a fair wage, without fear of abuse, retaliation or discrimination,” according to Koul and Shaw.
Koul and Shaw’s op-ed accuses Google executives of working with repressive governments, profiting from hate group advertisements and ignoring complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace.
“We joined Alphabet because we wanted to build technology that improves the world. Yet time and again, company leaders have put profits ahead of our concerns,” they said. (RELATED: 38 States Sue Google For Allegedly Manipulating Search Results)
The creation of the Alphabet Workers Union is a rare instance of a union forming in Silicon Valley, notorious for being anti-union, according to the New York Times. Koul and Shaw directly addressed those who believe unions have no place in tech companies, “we want to point out that these and other larger problems persist. Discrimination and harassment continue.”