On Monday, more than 400 Google employees and contractors announced that they had formed the Alphabet Workers Union, a significant milestone in the tech worker movement at the company and in Silicon Valley.
Previously, efforts to unionize the highly paid workers at Big Tech firms have struggled. But in the past few years, workers have increasingly called for change, particularly at Google. Some of the search engine giant’s employees have protested the company’s contracts with the Department of Defense and Customs and Border Protection and have pushed back against a project to build a censored search engine for China. In 2018, Google’s worker discontent saw its largest eruption when more than 20,000 employees walked out over Google’s handling of sexual harassment cases. Most recently, outraged employees spoke out against the way top AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru was forced out of Google in December.
Amid its workforce’s increasingly outspoken activism, Google has fired some employees and allegedly retaliating against others. The same day Gebru was pushed out, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Google had likely violated labor law when it fired two workers involved in organizing in November 2019.
“We’ve always worked hard to create a supportive and rewarding workplace for our workforce,” said Kara Silverstein, Director of People Operations at Google, when reached by email for comment. “Of course our employees have protected labor rights that we support. But as we’ve always done, we’ll continue engaging directly with all our employees.”
Unlike traditional unions, where employees band together and negotiate a contract with a company’s management that’s often focused on financial demands, the Alphabet Workers Union will be what’s known as a minority union, without a contract. Instead, its organizers aim to use the union to create a democratic structure for voicing demands and supporting workers when they have concerns. The Alphabet Workers Union is part of the larger Communication Workers of America union, which has members in industries like media and telecommunications.
To understand more about the union’s motives and goals, I spoke to one of its elected officials and another member who has long been involved in Google’s worker movement. Chewy Shaw, a software engineer focused on site reliability who has worked at Google since 2011, is the executive vice chair of the union’s executive council. Isaac Clerencia, another site reliability engineer, has been at Google since 2010.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
