Hundreds of workers at Google's parent company Alphabet have banded together to form a union in a bid to reduce the gap between the heads of big tech firms and their employees.
Unionising is relatively rare in Silicon Valley owing ot fears of retaliation. Credit: Carlos Luna / Flickr
The news was announced with an op-ed in the New York Times, which lists 226 of Alphabet's 140,000-strong workforce have banded together in an alliance with the Communications Workers of America - a union for people located within the IT sector.
Unionising in this way is incredibly rare in for larger technology companies, particularly for the firms based in places such as Silicon Valley.
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The union remains far too small to be able to properly effect or renegotiate its members' contracts, but it may be able to pressure the company to tackle ethical issues more seriously, such as properely dealing with misconduct or to properly protect the rights of temporary or contract workers on Alphabet's payroll.
Alan Morales, the organiser of the union, said he expects numbers to grow by the thousands.
He told the FT: “We want this union to make Alphabet and the world a better place and we want to advocate for our working conditions to make that happen.
“We realise that Google and other internet companies have products that are very relevant in our everyday lives and we think we can make the world a better place by using our collective bargaining power.”
Morales joined the union following a walkout owing to women's issues, but many workers refuse to unionise fearing retaliation from Alphabet.
Kara Silverstein, Alphabet’s director of people operations, 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 labour rights that we support. But as we’ve always done, we’ll continue engaging directly with all our employees.”
Workers have staged walkouts and protests against both Alphabet and Google in the past, such as a major walkout in 2018 over the handling of sexual midconduct allegations.
Later that year, several workers went public with their disapproval over the company helping China's authoritarian government build a censored search engine for use in its nationwide intranet.
In 2019, many workers also wrote public letters to encourage the tech giant to look to remove its carbon footprint by 2030, something it would not commit to until September 2020, alongside Facebook.
Several nations across Europe have been clamping down on so-called Big Tech companies which it feels are abusing their market positions to dodge taxes or stifle local competition.
This has been done in a bid to encourage European startups and bolster its technology sector.
Read more: The EU has been too slow in tackling Big Tech, external auditor says
Google was linked with Amazon back in October as the two companies admitted they would pass costs onto advertisers and third-party users in order to cut the losses of the 2% tax increase on revenues following the passing of a new Digital Rights Act.
The EU bloc has also begun clamping down on Big Tech companies by requiring they perform background checks on potential sellers and to a tackle a spread of dangerous or illegal content.
This all began with a 2009 investigation into Google's online shopping comparison service which resulted in a €2.4 billion fine the company still disputes to this day.
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