Googlers of the world, unite! | The union of …

In many rankings of the best places to work, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is often at or near the top. There are many reasons: employees move around the gigantic campus by bicycle and electric car, the furniture is “eco-responsible”, there is a playground, parks to relax, free food for a factory. multiethnic, their own employee transfer bus who have wifi, and the list goes on. The father in charge of a newborn has up to 22 weeks of leave, family salary and preschool on campus. Transgender staff have specific support policies. If the outside world is covered, there is also a lack of attention to motivation; employees must invest 20% of their time in their own innovative project. From there, services such as Google alert Yes Street view, among others.

The list is long, long, and includes your wallet: Engineers mostly pay so well that they produced a small real estate crisis in San Francisco, just 37 miles from Mountain View headquarters. Rents have risen so much since their arrival that local families have to lower their expectations or be left right on the streets.

However, this perfect world backed by one of the most profitable companies in the world and needing to attract hyper-skilled workers is starting to show cracks and workers getting organized.

During the celebration of the company’s IPO in 2004, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin said, “Our employees, who have called themselves Googlers, are everything. At that time, temporary or outsourced workers made up about a third of the total. In 2019, they exceeded the “Googlers” by several thousand. Entire teams were hired for development and then fired. Much of the traumatic moderation work is done by outsourced workers who burn themselves while watching for a few seconds content reported by Internet users: videos of beatings or murders of pedophilia. There are other more boring tasks like scanning books. The gap between the lowest salaries for these types of tasks and that of a software developer can range from $ 16 to $ 125 per hour, excluding other benefits.

But the majority of labor disputes actually stem from a mismatch between a company whose motto is “Don’t be mean” and some of its developments and practices. The examples are varied. In October 2018, around 20,000 workers around the world quit their jobs in protest after the company sacked and compensated Andy Rubin, an executive accused of repeated harassment, with $ 90 million. Workers have also repeatedly protested against unethical developments such as a custom search engine designed by Chinese censorship (Dragonfly) or facial recognition systems that are said to be used for autonomous drone attacks (Maven). , among others. The workers even published a letter questioning these decisions and calling for a ethics and transparency protocol.

It is in this context that in recent months, after an organization in the shadows, around 200 engineers have launched the Alphabet Workers Union, affiliated with the Communications Workers of America, which brings together regional workers in the United States and Canada. The percentage of affiliates is very low compared to the total number of employees and workers hired, estimated at around 260,000, but it is increasing and it is mainly engineers, whose positions are more difficult to fill, who defend the rest. The aim is to provide protection and better organize disputing claims authoritarian regimes, military and intelligence apparatus or dismissals of workers which called into question the ethics of the projects, as the union leaders explained in a public letter.

More recently also formed Alpha Global, a coalition of unions from more than ten countries that brings together Alphabet workers and is affiliated with UNI Global Union, a federation of over 20 million workers and one of the organizers of the Make Amazon Pay campaign. One of their goals is to pressure Google to promote workers’ union organization.

These workers’ organizations still do not have the power to sit down to discuss formally with the company and there is resistance from other groups who question their representativeness. Even so, they are the emergence of the contradiction between the utopian dreams of the first Internet on which big tech companies have thrived and predatory behavior quite similar to the historical practices of large companies. Organizing workers is the key to really understanding what is going on in these cutting edge companies that are very opaque to other types of controls.