We Built Google. This Is Not the Company We Want to Work For.

Our company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” An organized work force 
will help us live up to it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/opinion/google-union.html?auth=link-
dismiss-google1tap

On Nov. 1, 2018, at 11:10 a.m., some 20,000 Google employees, along with 
employees of Waymo, Verily and other Alphabet companies, stopped working 
and walked off the job in cities around the world. A week earlier, The New 
York Times reported that the company had paid tens of millions of dollars 
to two executives who had been accused of sexual misconduct toward our co-
workers, staying silent about the alleged abuse and letting them walk away 
with no consequences.

People speaking at the protests that morning recounted their own 
experiences of harassment and discrimination at the company. In San 
Francisco, one woman held up a sign reading, “I reported and he got 
promoted.” Others read, “Happy to quit for $90 million, no sexual 
harassment required” and “Unfair workplaces create unfair platforms.”

We’d had enough.

The two of us are software engineers, and we were recently elected 
executive chair and vice chair of the Alphabet Workers Union, a group of 
more than 200 workers in the United States who believe our company’s 
structure needs to change.

For far too long, thousands of us at Google — and other subsidiaries of 
Alphabet, Google’s parent company — have had our workplace concerns 
dismissed by executives. Our bosses have collaborated with repressive 
governments around the world. They have developed artificial intelligence 
technology for use by the Department of Defense and profited from ads by a 
hate group. They have failed to make the changes necessary to meaningfully 
address our retention issues with people of color.

Most recently, Timnit Gebru, a leading artificial intelligence researcher 
and one of the few Black women in her field, said she was fired over her 
work to fight bias. Her offense? Conducting research that was critical of 
large-scale AI models and being critical of existing diversity and 
inclusion efforts. In response, thousands of our colleagues organized, 
demanding an explanation. Both of us have heard from colleagues — some 
new, some with over a decade at the company — who have decided that 
working at Alphabet is no longer a choice they can make in good 
conscience.

Workers have mobilized against these abuses before. Organized workers at 
the company forced executives to drop Project Maven, the company’s 
artificial-intelligence program with the Pentagon, and Project Dragonfly, 
its plan to launch a censored search engine in China. Some of Alphabet’s 
subcontractors won a $15 minimum hourly wage, parental leave, and health 
insurance after an employee outcry. And the practice of forced arbitration 
for claims of sexual harassment was ended after the November 2018 walkout 
— albeit only for full-time employees, not contractors. A few months 
later, Google announced that it would end forced arbitration for employees 
for all claims.

To those who are skeptical of unions or believe that tech companies are 
more innovative without unions, we want to point out that these and other 
larger problems persist. Discrimination and harassment continue. Alphabet 
continues to crack down on those who dare to speak out, and keep workers 
from speaking on sensitive and publicly important topics, like antitrust 
and monopoly power. For a handful of wealthy executives, this 
discrimination and unethical working environment are working as intended, 
at the cost of workers with less institutional power, especially Black, 
brown, queer, trans, disabled, and women workers. Each time workers 
organize to demand change, Alphabet’s executives make token promises, 
doing the bare minimum in the hopes of placating workers.

It’s not enough. Today, we’re building on years of organizing efforts at 
Google to create a formal structure for workers. So far, 226 of us have 
signed union cards with the Communications Workers of America — the first 
step in winning a recognized bargaining unit under U.S. law. In other 
words, we are forming a union.

We are the workers who built Alphabet. We write code, clean offices, serve 
food, drive buses, test self-driving cars and do everything needed to keep 
this behemoth running. We joined Alphabet because we wanted to build 
technology that improves the world. Yet time and again, company leaders 
have put profits ahead of our concerns. We are joining together — temps, 
vendors, contractors, and full-time employees — to create a unified worker 
voice. We want Alphabet to be a company where workers have a meaningful 
say in decisions that affect us and the societies we live in.

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As union members, we have created an elected leadership and representative 
structure with dues-paying members. Our union will be open to all Alphabet 
workers, regardless of classification. About half of the workers at Google 
are temps, vendors or contractors. They are paid lower salaries, receive 
fewer benefits, and have little job stability compared with full-time 
employees, even though they often do the exact same work. They are also 
more likely to be Black or brown — a segregated employment system that 
keeps half of the company’s work force in second-class roles. Our union 
will seek to undo this grave inequity.

Everyone at Alphabet — from bus drivers to programmers, from salespeople 
to janitors — plays a critical part in developing our technology. But 
right now, a few wealthy executives define what the company produces and 
how its workers are treated. This isn’t the company we want to work for. 
We care deeply about what we build and what it’s used for. We are 
responsible for the technology we bring into the world. And we recognize 
that its implications reach far beyond the walls of Alphabet.

Our union will work to ensure that workers know what they’re working on, 
and can do their work at a fair wage, without fear of abuse, retaliation 
or discrimination. When Google went public in 2004, it said it would be a 
company that “does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-
term gains.” Its motto used to be “Don’t be evil.”

We will live by that motto. Alphabet is a powerful company, responsible 
for vast swaths of the internet. It is used by billions of people across 
the world. It has a responsibility to prioritize the public good. It has a 
responsibility to its thousands of workers and billions of users to make 
the world a better place. As Alphabet workers, we can help build that 
world.

Parul Koul is the executive chair of the Alphabet Workers Union. She is a 
software engineer who joined Google in 2019. Chewy Shaw is the vice chair 
of the Alphabet Workers Union. He is a site reliability engineer who has 
been at Google since 2011.

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