Google employees announced Monday to create a union, a move that coincides with an increase in differences with their management and with a period of growing discontent with the giants of Silicon Valley.
This union, which will be one of the very first in a flagship of Silicon Valley, will not only deal with issues related to wages and working conditions but also ethical issues, according to a statement from the founders.
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"
It will be the very first union open to all Alphabet employees and contractors, with members paying dues, a (representative) board of directors and duly paid staff
", we can read in the document.
About 226 employees have already announced their intention to join him, say in a column published in the New York Times, Parul Koul and Chewy Shaw, both engineers.
Alphabet oversees several entities including Google, YouTube and Waymo (self-driving cars), Verily, Fitbit and Wing, and employs more than 130,000 people around the world.
Internal tensions
“
Obviously our employees have rights that we support.
But as we always have done, we will continue to discuss directly with all our employees,
”said Kara Silverstein, a Google leader in an email to AFP.
The union “is
going to be the structure to ensure that Google employees can actively push for real change within the company, from contracts to wages to compensation issues.
All the problems related to the working environment will fail within the competence of the union and its members
”, underline the founders.
The formation of a union at Google comes after several months of internal tensions.
In 2018, Google employees signed a petition asking their CEO Sundar Pichai to end the group's participation in the Pentagon research program dubbed Maven.
The same year, employees of the group solemnly protested against the granting of large severance payments to executives accused of sexual harassment, including $ 90 million to Android boss Andy Rubin.
More recently, it was the dismissal in December 2020 of Timnit Gebru, a black researcher on ethical issues related to artificial intelligence, which crystallized the anger of employees.
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This dismissal has aroused indignation among many of us, especially among blacks and Hispanics, who are upset by the actions of the company and have no assurance about their future at Google
", further denounce the founders of the union.
Silicon Valley had managed to avoid the creation of unions by offering generous salaries to its employees but now faces employee activism on many societal issues.
