[“You have a union when you say you have a union.”]
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GOOGLE WORKERS SAY THE ENDLESS WAIT TO UNIONIZE BIG TECH IS OVER  
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Hamilton Nolan
January 4, 2021
In These Times - Labor
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_ “You have a union when you say you have a union.” _

, Mason Trinca/ Getty Images

 

The five most valu­able com­pa­nies in Amer­i­ca are all big tech
com­pa­nies, and none of them are union­ized. Com­pound­ing this
exis­ten­tial
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chal­lenge for orga­nized labor is the fact that the huge work
forces of the com­pa­nies make union­iz­ing them seem an
impos­si­bly large task. Now, one union has solved that prob­lem
with a rev­o­lu­tion­ary approach: Just start. 

This morn­ing, work­ers at Alpha­bet, the par­ent com­pa­ny of
Google, announced the for­ma­tion of the Alpha­bet Work­ers Union
[[link removed]] (AWU), affil­i­at­ed with the
Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers of Amer­i­ca, one of the few major
unions that has ded­i­cat­ed resources [[link removed]]
to orga­niz­ing the tech indus­try. The AWU is start­ing with just
over 200 mem­bers — a tiny frac­tion of the more than 200,000
total Google employ­ees
[[link removed]],
includ­ing full timers and con­trac­tors, that make up the $1.2
tril­lion com­pa­ny. But, after years of iso­lat­ed issue-based
activism by employ­ees, they real­ized that if they ever want­ed
a union, the only way to get it was to forge ahead. 

“A lot of us joined the com­pa­ny because we believed in the
val­ues. That wasn’t a sec­ondary thing, that was why we
joined,” says Chewy Shaw, a Google soft­ware engi­neer since 2013
who is now the vice chair of the AWU. Shaw describes a slow sour­ing
of his rela­tion­ship with the com­pa­ny in recent years, as
work­ers per­ceived as trou­ble­some were pushed out by hos­tile
man­age­ment, and oth­ers chose to leave over sharp eth­i­cal
dis­agree­ments about the company’s direc­tion. The inter­nal
uproar
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last year over Google’s con­tracts with gov­ern­ment agen­cies
like ICE was a clar­i­fy­ing moment for Shaw, who decid­ed that
if he was going to stay at the com­pa­ny, he had to
start organizing. 

Since the 2018 Google walk­outs protest­ing sex­u­al harass­ment
(and the sub­se­quent retal­i­a­tion
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against its orga­niz­ers), Google has been the most high pro­file
hotbed of work­er orga­niz­ing among the big tech
com­pa­nies — though all of that orga­niz­ing focused on
spe­cif­ic issues as they arose, rather than on form­ing a union.
Shaw began attend­ing events that employ­ees set up relat­ed to
orga­niz­ing: a lun­cheon, a book club, a lec­ture.
Even­tu­al­ly, he con­nect­ed with CWA staff and began actu­al
labor orga­niz­ing in earnest. Last June, a group called Googlers
Against Racism got more than 1,000 employ­ee sig­na­tures on
a Cowork​er​.org peti­tion
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urg­ing the com­pa­ny to take a num­ber of steps to pro­mote
diver­si­ty and end con­tracts with police. That group pro­vid­ed
a pool of inter­est­ed activist work­ers that led direct­ly to
dis­cus­sions about union­iz­ing, and to recruits for the union.
Shaw says that the fir­ing
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last month of Timnit Gebru, an inter­nal crit­ic of the com­pa­ny,
was ​“a real­ly big ral­ly­ing moment.” 

(In response to today’s news, the com­pa­ny said in
a state­ment: ​“We’ve always worked hard to cre­ate
a sup­port­ive and reward­ing work­place for our work­force. 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.”)

Google is a com­pa­ny of engi­neers, and if there’s one thing
engi­neers under­stand, it’s struc­tur­al issues. After the 2018
walk­out, ​“it became clear to me that it wasn’t enough. We
weren’t able to move the com­pa­ny the way it need­ed to be
moved,” says Auni Ahsan, a soft­ware engi­neer and one of the
union’s found­ing mem­bers. ​“We need a struc­ture that we
can devel­op that can be resilient.” 

Shaw scoffs at the long­stand­ing canard that engi­neers are
con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly hos­tile to labor orga­niz­ing, an idea
that has often been float­ed with­in both the labor and tech worlds
to explain why the tech indus­try remains large­ly non-union.
​“Peo­ple are at a com­pa­ny that has orga­nized 250,000
peo­ple to work on sim­i­lar projects,” he notes dri­ly. As
Google employ­ees have worked with CWA to build their union, they
have also been study­ing labor his­to­ry and Amer­i­can labor
law, and their diag­no­sis of the weak­ness­es in today’s labor
move­ment has helped inform their path. ​“We’ve been think­ing
some of [the decline of unions] is due to how peo­ple have been
lean­ing on the legal struc­ture, and it does­n’t give enough
pro­tec­tion unless you fit a spe­cif­ic sce­nario,”
Shaw says. 

The AWU’s struc­ture could be a mod­el for future tech
orga­niz­ing. It will be a dues-sup­port­ed orga­ni­za­tion,
like a union, but it will be open to both full time employ­ees and
con­trac­tors, who make up more than half of Google’s work force.
The union has been orga­niz­ing in secret, mean­ing that much of
its recruit­ment work was restrict­ed to the social net­works of
its var­i­ous employ­ee orga­niz­ers. They decid­ed to go
pub­lic after claim­ing 200 mem­bers, and they hope that the rush
of pub­lic­i­ty will bring in thou­sands of more mem­bers in
short order. AWU will not be able to engage in for­mal col­lec­tive
bar­gain­ing like a union that rep­re­sents the entire staff, but
it will be a per­ma­nent, grow­ing, and very vocal
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posi­tioned square­ly inside one of the world’s most pow­er­ful
com­pa­nies — some­thing that would have been vir­tu­al­ly
impos­si­ble if CWA had tried to fol­low a tra­di­tion­al union
orga­niz­ing route with­in Google. 

“Thou­sands or mil­lions of peo­ple will wake up and see this
sto­ry and see that you don’t need to wait for the labor board to
approve your union,” Ahsan says. ​“You have a union when you
say you have a union.”

Hamil­ton Nolan [[link removed]] is
a labor reporter for _In These Times_. He has spent the past decade
writ­ing about labor and pol­i­tics for Gawk­er, Splin­ter, The
Guardian, and else­where. You can reach him at
Hamilton@​InTheseTimes.​com.

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