Image: Mason Trinca
“We want to have a counterforce to protect
workers who are speaking up,” Shaw said.
The latest examples came last month, when
prominent AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru says
she was fired over a research paper that Google
wanted to disassociate from; and as a federal
labor agency filed a complaint accusing the
company of spying on employees and then firing
some of them during a 2019 effort to organize a
union. Google has denied the allegations in the
case, which is scheduled for an April hearing.
The union’s first members include engineers, as
well as sales associates, administrative assistants
and the workers who test self-driving vehicles
at Alphabet automotive division Waymo. Many
work at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters,
while others are at offices in Massachusetts, New
York and Colorado.
“One of the reasons why it’s taken a while for
workers to get to this point is because the
leaders of these companies did a good job of
convincing workers they were these benevolent
folks who were going to provide for them,
kind of a paternalistic model,” said Beth Allen,
communications director at the CWA.
“That got them a long way,” Allen said, but
workers have increasingly realized they need “to
come together and build power for themselves
and have a voice in what’s going on.”
The National Labor Relations Board typically
recognizes petitions to form new unions when
they get interest from at least 30% of employees
in a given location or job classification in
the U.S.; a majority of affected workers must
then vote to form one. Alphabet has a global
workforce of roughly 130,000.