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**JANUARY 5, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

The Google Uprising in Context

Don't let this get around, but professionals are forming unions like
crazy these days.

In just the past couple of years, journalists at new and old media
outlets, graduate student teaching and research assistants at public and
private universities, employees of nonprofit foundations and nonprofit
recipients of foundations, and the workers who make the tech world go
round have all opted to unionize. Just yesterday, a union unveiled
itself at Google, adopting the form of a semi-union in a clear effort to
keep Google from crushing it.

To that end, the new Google union isn't seeking collective-bargaining
rights, which, under the whittled-down National Labor Relations Act,
would effectively enable Google management to do just about anything to
threaten and harass its members. By not submitting itself to the
jurisdiction of the stunted law governing employment relationships, the
new union can exercise its First Amendment rights to raise a host of
issues-including Google's impact on the wider world and its coddling
of executives who've sexually harassed employees-in ways that what
passes for labor law here might restrain.

Google is certainly ripe for such worker uprisings. In 2018, some 20,000
Google employees walked off the job to protest the tens of millions of
dollars Google had paid to two executives who'd resigned when the
charges of sexual harassment were lodged against them. Employees have
also protested the company's providing its technology to Trump's
border guards.

Google will still surely seek to undermine its new union, even though it
isn't seeking the company's recognition or bargaining rights; such
worker-rights phobia seems to be the knee-jerk reaction of Big Tech's
owners generally. Right now, Amazon is campaigning against the efforts
of its employees in a Birmingham, Alabama, warehouse to win bargaining
rights, notwithstanding the fact that Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos, whose
current estimated wealth is roughly $180 billion, could personally buy
the entire state of Alabama if he so desired.

By a number of metrics, American workers' desire to unionize has
seldom been higher. The most recent Gallup poll on the subject shows
that 65 percent of Americans have a favorable view of unions, the
highest level in many decades. The immovable object that counters what
is not yet an irresistible force is the pathological hatred of unions by
the nation's CEOs, who exploit the deficiencies in our labor laws to
threaten their workers' livelihoods if they want to organize and
bargain. When a workforce consists of hard-to-replace professionals,
however, the balance of power may shift to the workers: hence the recent
wave of unionization among professionals. (This is also why professional
athletes and airline pilots have long had some of the strongest unions
around.) The growing militance and strategic smarts of American workers
is a hugely welcome development; at some point, though, those qualities
need to be augmented by sufficient political clout to change our labor
laws so that workers can finally receive what's due them for their
work.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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