USA: Google union launched
By Luis Meiners
In Silicon Valley, the year began with an announcement that quickly made international news.. Google workers publicly announced the launch of their union, el Alphabet Workers Union. This is an important step in an industry marked by anti-union business practices, but also because of a growing activism that has had several milestones in the last decade.
The Alphabet Workers Union seeks to bring together all Alphabet workers, the parent conglomerate of which Google is the main subsidiary. They openly express that they seek to organize full-time workers, part time, contracted and sellers, which constitutes an important element in an industry characterized by the diversity of its forms of contracting.
Today they have more than two hundred members. While the figure constitutes a small percentage of the company's workforce, seek to consolidate and organize growing activism. Being a "minority union", do not have recognition to participate in collective bargaining processes with the employer, but in a country with restrictive labor legislation and in an industry with employers particularly hostile to union presence, creating a permanent structure is a milestone in the organization.
A history of struggle
As you review in yourWeb page, union development is part of a history of organizing and resistance. In the last decade this process has had several milestones in which workers have fought for a variety of demands, from the hiring and working conditions, support for homeworkers, Discrimination in the work area, sexual harassment, to the questioning of the uses given by the company to the technology they develop.
To name a few examples of this process, in the year 2015 an action was organized against wage inequality and gender and racial discrimination, publicly displaying their salaries to give visibility to the differences. In 2018 thousands of workers signed and spread a petition against Google's contracts with the Pentagon, demanding a commitment from the company to ensure that its technology is not used for war. This campaign achieved that these contracts are not renewed. In 2019 fought to prevent contracts from being signed with the agencies in charge of anti-immigrant policies, and in 2020, in the framework of the historic rebellion against racism and police violence, They launched a petition to stop selling technology to police departments.
A particularly important action in this story was the "Walkout for Real Change". It was an international action carried out on November 1, 2018 in which thousands of Google workers around the world simultaneously left their jobs and rallied in front of company buildings against sexual harassment at work and company policies against it. This action was a massive response to the company's decision to give millionaire retirement compensation to executives accused of harassment. Only in New York more than 3 a thousand people protested in front of Google headquarters on that day.
In response to this growing activism, in 2019 Alphabet hired an outside consultancy to investigate its workers and carry out retaliation, also censoring spaces for discussion. Faced with this bosses offensive, the workers redoubled the bet, seeking links with organized sectors of the labor movement. This is how they related to the Communications Workers of America, union that groups communication and information workers, and from the work with this sector arose the founding of the Alphabet Workers Union.
It is an important event in a strategic sector of the world economy. Undoubtedly it is one more example of a general process of radicalization of sectors of the youth and the working class that has been experienced in the United States since the crisis of 2008. The pandemic and the anti-racist rebellion have deepened this process, that will surely continue to produce advances in the organization and struggle of the working class like the one that Google workers have given.
