Google Workers Say the Endless Wait to Unionize Big Tech Is Over
“You have a union when you say you have a union.”
▻https://inthesetimes.com/article/google-workers-alphabet-union-cwa
The five most valuable companies in America are all big tech companies, and none of them are unionized. Compounding this existential 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.
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Since the 2018 #Google walkouts protesting sexual harassment (and the subsequent retaliation 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 Coworker.org petition 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 last month of #Timnit_Gebru, an internal critic of the company, was “a really big rallying moment.”