Shannon Wait: the young employee who took Google and won

Everyone has a limit. And when that happens, the trigger can be a small thing, an incident that normally wouldn’t matter. Shannon Wait’s moment came when the bottle of water that Google gave her broke. The data center where he worked was very hot, so he requested another one. He says the Google subcontractor he worked for refused to give it to him.

This moment triggered a chain reaction Which led to an announcement last week: Google signed a statement saying company employees have the right to discuss their pay and working conditions with each other.

It may even seem strange that it is necessary to say something like that. But in fact, it was the culmination of Shannon Wait’s battle with the company.

Their story is a story of the bosses’ extra limits, a story that sheds light on managerial practices that have become commonplace in the high tech world.

Hard work

Shannon completed her bachelor’s degree in history in 2018 and started working at a Google data center in South Carolina the following February, earning $ 15 an hour.

“You repair the servers, which includes changing hard drives, changing motherboards, lifting heavy batteries, about 13.6 kilograms each,” he says. “It’s really hard work.”

Google offices have a reputation for being creative, alternative, and fun, with ping-pong tables, free snacks, and music rooms. However, what Shannon describes seems less idyllic. “People don’t play all day like you see in the movies. The data center is completely different, ”he explains.

Shannon was an entrepreneur at Google. This means that although she worked in a Google data center, she was actually employed by a subcontractor called Modis, which was part of a group of companies owned by another company, Adecco.

This complicated arrangement has become more and more common at Google. About half of the people who work for the company are entrepreneurs. This makes it difficult to determine who is responsible for management errors. But we’ll talk about that later.

Bonus promise

Shannon says when the pandemic broke, the job became more difficult. Increase in the minimum number of tasks to be performed per shift. But there was a compromise.

“Around May 2020, Google announced that it would handle the pandemic in an honorable manner. They said they were going to give bonuses to all the employees, including contractors, who will work in person, ”he says.

“The time came when we were supposed to receive the bonus and it was not showing up in our bank accounts. We started to worry, you know, we said, “I could really use that extra money”. Around this time, Shannon recalls, employees started talking to each other about the bonus and how much they were entitled to.

“We started to wonder about the salary, but every time the subject was brought up in front of a boss, we were told not to talk about it.” Shannon says she even got a message from a boss saying, “It’s never okay to talk about compensation with your coworkers.” He showed it to the BBC:

Eventually, Shannon received the bonus, but said she was already disappointed. I was hoping to get a full time job at Google. Instead, he perceived a culture of “perma-temps,” of temporary staff who, he stresses, will never be corrected, no matter how hard they try.

The breaking point

Frustrated with the directing, Shannon has reached what she marks as her breaking point. “It’s very hot in the data centers, around 29.5 ° C. Google gave me a bottle of water, but the cap broke. He points out that the same thing happened to his colleague, a full-time Google employee. His colleague received a new bottle, but she did not.

He went home and wrote an article on Facebook.

He said he had “had enough”.

“The next day I was at work and they called me to a meeting room with virtually all of the bosses present. They told me that my post on Facebook violated the confidentiality agreement, that I was a security risk and that I had to hand over my pass and my computer immediately and be escorted to the exit ”.

In the hands of the union

The Alphabet Workers Union (the parent company of Google) was formed in January 2021 for Google employees. It is not recognized by the National Council for Labor Relations, an independent government agency sometimes referred to as a “minority union”. The vast majority of Google employees are not members, but Shannon was and the union took over her case.

In February, they filed two lawsuits on his behalf under unfair labor practices laws. First, she had been illegally suspended for speaking out about her support for a union. And the other, that his bosses had illegally asked him not to talk about his salary.

Last month, Google, Modis and Alphabet Workers Union reach agreement. Shannon’s suspension was revoked. Google signed a document saying its employees “have the right to talk about wages and working conditions.”

It was a victory for Shannon and the newly formed union. “The people who work in the warehouses and data centers of these trillion dollar companies are tired of having their smallest rights violated. And they realize that companies don’t listen to their employees. So we’re going to force them to do it. “

Last week, Amazon workers in Alabama vote on unionization. Amazon is desperate to avoid labor unions.

The result must come soon. It’s the latest battle between the tech giants and the workers who feel, to say the least, unloved.

“I think one of the most important things people can learn is that not all Google employees have a six-figure salary … and even at the lowest level at Google, employees have a lot of power, a lot more power than they think, ”Shannon said.

And from Google?

Google did not admit doing anything wrong under the settlement and did not admit to being a “co-employer” of contract staff. The BBC submitted Shannon’s version to Google, but the company said it had nothing more to add.

Adecco did not respond to the BBC’s request for an interview.

Shannon doesn’t want to go back to Google’s data center because she wants to do a doctorate in history.

So far, she has already contributed to the history books with the rare victory of an employee against a tech giant.

BBC Mundo