https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/technology/google-employees-union.html
Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of Activism
The creation of the union, a rarity in Silicon Valley, follows years of increasing outspokenness by Google workers. Executives have struggled to handle the change.
OAKLAND, Calif. — More than 400 Google engineers and other workers have formed a union, the group revealed on Monday, capping years of growing activism at one of the world’s largest companies and presenting a rare beachhead for labor organizers in staunchly anti-union Silicon Valley.
The union’s creation is highly unusual for the tech industry, which has long resisted efforts to organize its largely white-collar work force. It follows increasing demands by employees at Google for policy overhauls on pay, harassment and ethics, and is likely to escalate tensions with top leadership.
The new union, called the Alphabet Workers Union after Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was organized in secret for the better part of a year and elected its leadership last month. The group is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America, a union that represents workers in telecommunications and media in the United States and Canada.
But unlike a traditional union, which demands that an employer come to the bargaining table to agree on a contract, the Alphabet Workers Union is a so-called minority union that represents a fraction of the company’s more than 260,000 full-time employees and contractors. Workers said it was primarily an effort to give structure and longevity to activism at Google, rather than to negotiate for a contract.
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Chewy Shaw, an engineer at Google in the San Francisco Bay Area and the vice chair of the union’s leadership council, said the union was a necessary tool to sustain pressure on management so that workers could force changes on workplace issues.
“Our goals go beyond the workplace questions of ‘Are people getting paid enough?’ Our issues are going much broader,” he said. “It is a time where a union is an answer to these problems.”
In response, Kara Silverstein, Google’s director of people operations, said: “We’ve always worked hard to create a supportive and rewarding workplace for our work force. Of course, our employees have protected labor rights that we support. But as we’ve always done, we’ll continue engaging directly with all our employees.”
The new union is the clearest sign of how thoroughly employee activism has swept through Silicon Valley over the past few years. While software engineers and other tech workers largely kept quiet in the past on societal and political issues, employees at Amazon, Salesforce, Pinterest and others have become more vocal on matters like diversity, pay discrimination and sexual harassment.
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Nowhere have those voices been louder than at Google. In 2018, more than 20,000 employees staged a walkout to protest how the company handled sexual harassment. Others have opposed business decisions that they deemed unethical, such as developing artificial intelligence for the Defense Department and providing technology to Customs and Border Protection.
Even so, unions have not gained traction in Silicon Valley. Many tech workers shunned them, arguing that labor groups were focused on issues like wages — not a top concern in the high-earning industry — and were not equipped to address their concerns about ethics and the role of technology in society. Labor organizers also found it difficult to corral the tech companies’ huge work forces, which are scattered around the globe.
Only a few small union drives have succeeded in tech in the past. Workers at the crowdfunding site Kickstarter and at the app development platform Glitch won union campaigns last year, and a small group of contractors at a Google office in Pittsburgh unionized in 2019. Thousands of employees at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama are also set to vote on a union in the coming months.
“There are those who would want you to believe that organizing in the tech industry is completely impossible,” Sara Steffens, C.W.A.’s secretary-treasurer, said of the new Google union. “If you don’t have unions in the tech industry, what does that mean for our country? That’s one reason, from C.W.A.’s point of view, that we see this as a priority.”
Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, said the Google union was a “powerful experiment” because it brought unionization into a major tech company and skirted barriers that had prevented such organizing.
“If it grows — which Google will do everything they can to prevent — it could have huge impacts not just for the workers but for the broader issues that we are all thinking about in terms of tech power in society,” she said.
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The union is likely to ratchet up tensions between Google engineers, who work on autonomous cars, artificial intelligence and internet search, and the company’s management. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, and other executives have tried to come to grips with an increasingly activist work force — but have made missteps.
Last month, federal officials said Google had most likely wrongly fired two employees who protested its work with immigration authorities in 2019. Timnit Gebru, a Black woman who is a respected artificial intelligence researcher, also said last month that Google had fired her after she criticized the company’s approach to minority hiring and the biases built into A.I. systems. Her departure set off a storm of criticism about Google’s treatment of minority employees.
“These companies find it a bone in their throat to even have a small group of people who say, ‘We work at Google and have another point of view,’” said Nelson Lichtenstein, the director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Google might well succeed in decimating any organization that comes to the floor.”
The Alphabet Workers Union, which represents employees in Silicon Valley and cities like Cambridge, Mass., and Seattle, gives protection and resources to workers who join. Those who opt to become members will contribute 1 percent of their total compensation to the union to fund its efforts.
Over the past year, the C.W.A. has pushed to unionize white-collar tech workers. (The NewsGuild, a union that represents New York Times employees, is part of the C.W.A.) The drive focused initially on employees at video game companies, who often work grueling hours and face layoffs.
In late 2019, C.W.A. organizers began meeting with Google employees to discuss a union drive, workers who attended the meetings said. Some employees were receptive and signed cards to officially join the union last summer. In December, the Alphabet Workers Union held elections to select a seven-person executive council.
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But several Google employees who had previously organized petitions and protests at the company objected to the C.W.A.’s overtures. They said they had declined to join because they worried that the effort had sidelined experienced organizers and played down the risks of organizing as it recruited members.
Amr Gaber, a Google software engineer who helped organize the 2018 walkout, said C.W.A. officials were dismissive of other labor groups that had supported Google workers during a December 2019 phone call with him and others.
“They are more concerned about claiming turf than the needs of the workers who were on the phone call,” Mr. Gaber said. “As a long-term labor organizer and brown man, that’s not the type of union I want to build.”
The C.W.A. said it had been selected by Google workers to help organize the union and had not elbowed its way in. “It’s really the workers who chose,” Ms. Steffens of C.W.A. said.
Traditional unions typically enroll a majority of a work force and petition a state or federal labor board like the National Labor Relations Board to hold an election. If they win the vote, they can bargain with their employer on a contract. A minority union allows employees to organize without first winning a formal vote before the N.L.R.B.
The C.W.A. has used this model to organize groups in states where it said labor laws were unfavorable, like the Texas State Employees Union and the United Campus Workers in Tennessee.
The structure also gives the union the latitude to include Google contractors, who outnumber full-time workers and who would be excluded from a traditional union. Some Google employees have considered establishing a minority or solidarity union for several years, and ride-hailing drivers have formed similar groups.
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Although they will not be able to negotiate a contract, the Alphabet Workers Union can use other tactics to pressure Google into changing its policies, labor experts said. Minority unions often turn to public pressure campaigns and lobby legislative or regulatory bodies to influence employers.
“We’re going to use every tool that we can to use our collective action to protect people who we think are being discriminated against or retaliated against,” Mr. Shaw said.
Members cited the recent N.L.R.B. finding on the firing of two employees and the exit of Dr. Gebru, the prominent researcher, as reasons to broaden its membership and publicly step up its efforts.
“Google is making it all the more clear why we need this now,” said Auni Ahsan, a software engineer at Google and an at-large member of the union’s executive council. “Sometimes the boss is the best organizer.”
Google’s Shadow Work Force: Temps Who Outnumber Full-Time Employees
SAN FRANCISCO — Mindy Cruz had an offer for a full-time position at another big tech company when she accepted a temporary job as a recruiter at Google in 2017. The pay was less and the benefits were not as good, but it was one step closer to her dream of becoming a Google employee.
Ms. Cruz became one of Google’s many temps and contractors — a shadow work force that now outnumbers the company’s full-time employees. But she never made the jump to full time. She was swiftly fired after a Google manager, who she said had harassed her for months, told the temp agency that had hired her that he wanted her gone.
High-tech companies have long promoted the idea that they are egalitarian, idyllic workplaces. And Google, perhaps more than any other, has represented that image, with a reputation for enviable salaries and benefits and lavish perks.
But the company’s increasing reliance on temps and contractors has some Google employees wondering if management is undermining its carefully crafted culture. As of March, Google worked with roughly 121,000 temps and contractors around the world, compared with 102,000 full-time employees, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times.
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Though they often work side by side with full-timers, Google temps are usually employed by outside agencies. They make less money, have different benefits plans and have no paid vacation time in the United States, according to more than a dozen current and former Google temp and contract workers, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
Better treatment for those workers was one of the demands made by organizers of a Google employee walkout last year to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment complaints.
“It’s time to end the two-tier system that treats some workers as expendable,” the walkout organizers wrote on Twitter in March.
When Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, did not respond to those demands, a group of anonymous contractors sent an open letter demanding equal pay and better opportunities for advancement. In April, hundreds of Google employees signed another letter protesting the dismissal of about 80 percent of a 43-person team of contingent workers working on the company’s artificial intelligence assistant.
In response, Google said it was changing a number of its policies to improve conditions for its temps and contractors.
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The reliance on temporary help has generated more controversy inside Google than it has at other big tech outfits, but the practice is common in Silicon Valley. Contingent labor accounts for 40 to 50 percent of the workers at most technology firms, according to estimates by OnContracting, a site that helps people find tech contracting positions.
OnContracting estimates that a technology company can save $100,000 a year on average per American job by using a contractor instead of a full-time employee.
“It’s creating a caste system inside companies,” said Pradeep Chauhan, who runs OnContracting.
In statements to The Times, Google did not directly address concerns that it had created a two-tiered work force, but said it did not hire contractors simply to save money.
Eileen Naughton, Google’s vice president of people operations, said that if a contingent worker “is not having a good experience, we provide lots of ways to report complaints or express concerns.”
She added, “We investigate, we hold individuals to account and we work to make things right for any person impacted.”
‘Googlers Are Everything’
When Google became a public company in 2004, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wrote that they believed in rewarding employees with unusual benefits because “our employees, who have named themselves Googlers, are everything.”
But not everyone doing work for Google over the years has been a Googler. The company has been using temps and contractors since its early years in projects like scanning books for online search. According to one former Google employee, temps and contractors accounted for about a third of the work force about a decade ago, and that share has steadily climbed.
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Google’s contractors handle a range of jobs, from content moderation to software testing. Their hourly pay varies, from $16 per hour for an entry-level content reviewer to $125 per hour for a top-shelf software developer.
Google usually pays staffing companies, which find the workers and provide them with salaries and benefits as their employer.
But the current and former contract and temp workers, as well as four Google employees, said Google was the employer in all but name. It decides what jobs they do, dictates where and what hours they work, and often decides if and when to fire them.
Google’s contractors are barred from company events like holiday parties and all-hands meetings. They are not permitted to look at internal job postings or attend company job fairs.
In some instances, email messages about workplace security concerns that went out to full-time staff were not shared with contract workers even though they worked in the same offices, the contractors and temps told The Times.
In their letter to Mr. Pichai, the temp workers said the company sent security updates only to full-time employees during a shooting at YouTube’s offices last year, leaving contractors “defenseless in the line of fire.” They were also barred from a meeting the next day to discuss the attack.
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Andrea Faville, a YouTube spokeswoman, said that the exclusion had been an oversight and that contractors had been invited to another companywide meeting later that week. She said all security updates went out to all staff, including contractors and temps, although two contractors working at YouTube said they had not received notices.
Temps for Training A.I.
Google has relied on temporary workers even when the work has become more permanent.
When the company started a research project code-named Pygmalion in 2014 to improve its speech-recognition technology, it hired temporary employees — many of whom had doctorates in linguistics — to help annotate and structure data so Google’s computers could better understand what people were saying, according to five people familiar with the project.
The team grew to about 250, and the majority were contractors. Some contractors worked two years on the project, which is Google’s limit, and took a six-month break before returning in a similar role.
As the project grew, Google managers pressed contractors to do more. In a complaint to the human resources department, one full-time employee said project leaders pressured contractors to work longer hours than stated in their contracts without reporting overtime. The project leaders made subtle promises of conversion to full-time status, two of the employees said.
Google said it had learned of a possible violation in February and immediately opened an investigation, which is still continuing, into unpaid overtime. The company said it instructed employees not to promise temps future employment.
“Our policy is clear that all temporary workers must be paid for any overtime worked,” Ms. Naughton said. “If we find that anyone isn’t properly paid, we make sure they are compensated appropriately and take action against any Google employee who violates this policy.”
States and the federal government are trying to define the distinction between contractors and employees more clearly. The difference usually depends on how much control the company exercises over the worker. That is based on certain criteria, like whether the company has the power to hire or fire the employee, or supervise and control work schedules or conditions of employment. As a result, companies keep contingent workers at arm’s length.
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In response to the issues with its temp work force, Google is both trying to improve their treatment and distancing itself from their management.
Last month, Google said it would require staffing agencies to provide contract and temp workers with comprehensive health care, paid parental leave and an hourly minimum wage of $15.
Many contractors who reported to a Google employee are now being managed by another contractor, who is the only one permitted to speak to full-time employees, three of the workers said. And Google is moving groups of contractors out of some offices in the United States and into separate buildings owned by Google but mostly managed by outside contractors.
When Ms. Cruz, the temp recruiter, worked in a Google office in Mountain View, Calif., she sat with permanent recruiters and used a Google email address. Her manager, a Google employee, said he expected to convert her to full-time status after a year as long as she met her hiring quotas, which she did.
That’s why she didn’t say anything when her manager started asking her out. She repeatedly rebuffed him, she said, and his advances turned to harassment. He once invited her to a team outing at a winery that turned out to be just the two of them. That night, he tried to kiss her and put his hand up her dress.
“I had heard that a lot of times when you say something to your recruiting agency, they just take you out of the situation and put you somewhere else,” Ms. Cruz said. “And I didn’t want my job to go away.”
She said she had considered reporting a claim when she suspected her manager was looking for a way to fire her. But she was fired in February before she had a chance. Her account was detailed in legal documents seen by The Times. Ms. Cruz’s sister, Kristi Beck, said her sister had told her about the harassment while it had been going on.
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Ms. Cruz’s agency, Search Wizards of Sarasota, Fla., told her that Google was dissatisfied with her work. She was told that the dismissal was unusual, but that there wasn’t much the agency could do because her manager wanted her gone.
Miranda Hinshaw, chief executive of Search Wizards, said the company did not “discuss past or present employees/contractors with any third party.”
Ms. Cruz filed a complaint to Google a month later. Google said it had fired the manager in April after it investigated.
Ms. Cruz agreed to a settlement in mediation after months of proceedings. (Google said the matter was now resolved.) But one part of the settlement still gnaws at her: She is not allowed to work for Google again.
“It feels so unfair,” she said. “They took away this very big opportunity.”
Google Researcher Says She Was Fired Over Paper Highlighting Bias in A.I.
Timnit Gebru, one of the few Black women in her field, had voiced exasperation over the company’s response to efforts to increase minority hiring.
Cade Metz and
A well-respected Google researcher said she was fired by the company after criticizing its approach to minority hiring and the biases built into today’s artificial intelligence systems.
Timnit Gebru, who was a co-leader of Google’s Ethical A.I. team, said in a tweet on Wednesday evening that she was fired because of an email she had sent a day earlier to a group that included company employees.
In the email, reviewed by The New York Times, she expressed exasperation over Google’s response to efforts by her and other employees to increase minority hiring and draw attention to bias in artificial intelligence.
“Your life starts getting worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people. You start making the other leaders upset,” the email read. “There is no way more documents or more conversations will achieve anything.”
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Her departure from Google highlights growing tension between Google’s outspoken work force and its buttoned-up senior management, while raising concerns over the company’s efforts to build fair and reliable technology. It may also have a chilling effect on both Black tech workers and researchers who have left academia in recent years for high-paying jobs in Silicon Valley.
“Her firing only indicates that scientists, activists and scholars who want to work in this field — and are Black women — are not welcome in Silicon Valley,” said Mutale Nkonde, a fellow with the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab. “It is very disappointing.”
A Google spokesman declined to comment. In an email sent to Google employees, Jeff Dean, who oversees Google’s A.I. work, including that of Dr. Gebru and her team, called her departure “a difficult moment, especially given the important research topics she was involved in, and how deeply we care about responsible A.I. research as an org and as a company.”
After years of an anything-goes environment where employees engaged in freewheeling discussions in companywide meetings and online message boards, Google has started to crack down on workplace discourse. Many Google employees have bristled at the new restrictions and have argued that the company has broken from a tradition of transparency and free debate.
On Wednesday, the National Labor Relations Board said Google had most likely violated labor law when it fired two employees who were involved in labor organizing. The federal agency said Google illegally surveilled the employees before firing them.
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Google’s battles with its workers, who have spoken out in recent years about the company’s handling of sexual harassment and its work with the Defense Department and federal border agencies, have diminished its reputation as a utopia for tech workers with generous salaries, perks and workplace freedom.
Like other technology companies, Google has also faced criticism for not doing enough to resolve the lack of women and racial minorities among its ranks.
The problems of racial inequality, especially the mistreatment of Black employees at technology companies, has plagued Silicon Valley for years. Coinbase, the most valuable cryptocurrency start-up, has experienced an exodus of Black employees in the last two years over what the workers said was racist and discriminatory treatment.
Researchers worry that the people who are building artificial intelligence systems may be building their own biases into the technology. Over the past several years, several public experiments have shown that the systems often interact differently with people of color — perhaps because they are underrepresented among the developers who create those systems.
Dr. Gebru, 37, was born and raised in Ethiopia. In 2018, while a researcher at Stanford University, she helped write a paper that is widely seen as a turning point in efforts to pinpoint and remove bias in artificial intelligence. She joined Google later that year, and helped build the Ethical A.I. team.
After hiring researchers like Dr. Gebru, Google has painted itself as a company dedicated to “ethical” A.I. But it is often reluctant to publicly acknowledge flaws in its own systems.
In an interview with The Times, Dr. Gebru said her exasperation stemmed from the company’s treatment of a research paper she had written with six other researchers, four of them at Google. The paper, also reviewed by The Times, pinpointed flaws in a new breed of language technology, including a system built by Google that underpins the company’s search engine.
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These systems learn the vagaries of language by analyzing enormous amounts of text, including thousands of books, Wikipedia entries and other online documents. Because this text includes biased and sometimes hateful language, the technology may end up generating biased and hateful language.
After she and the other researchers submitted the paper to an academic conference, Dr. Gebru said, a Google manager demanded that she either retract the paper from the conference or remove her name and the names of the other Google employees. She refused to do so without further discussion and, in the email sent Tuesday evening, said she would resign after an appropriate amount of time if the company could not explain why it wanted her to retract the paper and answer other concerns.
The company responded to her email, she said, by saying it could not meet her demands and that her resignation was accepted immediately. Her access to company email and other services was immediately revoked.
In his note to employees, Mr. Dean said Google respected “her decision to resign.” Mr. Dean also said that the paper did not acknowledge recent research showing ways of mitigating bias in such systems.
“It was dehumanizing,” Dr. Gebru said. “They may have reasons for shutting down our research. But what is most upsetting is that they refuse to have a discussion about why.”
Dr. Gebru’s departure from Google comes at a time when A.I. technology is playing a bigger role in nearly every facet of Google’s business. The company has hitched its future to artificial intelligence — whether with its voice-enabled digital assistant or its automated placement of advertising for marketers — as the breakthrough technology to make the next generation of services and devices smarter and more capable.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has compared the advent of artificial intelligence to that of electricity or fire, and has said that it is essential to the future of the company and computing. Earlier this year, Mr. Pichai called for greater regulation and responsible handling of artificial intelligence, arguing that society needs to balance potential harms with new opportunities.
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Google has repeatedly committed to eliminating bias in its systems. The trouble, Dr. Gebru said, is that most of the people making the ultimate decisions are men. “They are not only failing to prioritize hiring more people from minority communities, they are quashing their voices,” she said.
Julien Cornebise, an honorary associate professor at University College London and a former researcher with DeepMind, a prominent A.I. lab owned by the same parent company as Google’s, was among many artificial intelligence researchers who said Dr. Gebru’s departure reflected a larger problem in the industry.
“This shows how some large tech companies only support ethics and fairness and other A.I.-for-social-good causes as long as their positive P.R. impact outweighs the extra scrutiny they bring,” he said. “Timnit is a brilliant researcher. We need more like her in our field.”
