Big plans from the Alphabet Workers Union

The Alphabet Workers Union, a group I’ve been following since its launch in January 2021, talked to me this week about some big plans it has for the rest of the year that could ripple across the tech world.

The AWU now has more than 1,100 members, and it has spent quite a bit of time in the last year and a half testing what strategies work and surveying members about priorities. It’s had its ups and downs, but while it’s been chugging along inside of Google, growing quietly, the world around it has become measurably more pro-union.

The private-sector unionization rate in the U.S. has hovered near historic lows for several years (between 6-6.2%), but 2022 could be the year that changes that. As I highlighted in Tuesday’s newsletter, the National Labor Relations Board said in mid-July that the union petition rate for this fiscal year has already surpassed the total for last year’s, despite the fact that we’re only six months in. The unionization efforts are making a splash — think Starbucks, Apple, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Lululemon, even Medieval Times.

AWU is about to launch a push to formally unionize groups of contract workers across Alphabet. While the company has a bit more than 100,000 full-time employees (FTEs), it also has an estimated 100,000 or so contractors and temporary vendor workers (TVCs). Many of the union’s members have been focused on the stark divide between the FTEs and TVCs in terms of pay and benefits since the union’s launch. It has become especially apparent over the past year that contract workers have specific, addressable concerns, and that the AWU has the power to help them form unions that can win recognition from the NLRB.

A recent example: The Google Maps contractors in Bothell, Washington, are technically employed by Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. Shelby Hunter, a policy trainer for Cognizant, joined AWU about a year ago after learning about it from a departing colleague.

At first, he couldn’t persuade the others in his office to have any interest. But after Cognizant tried to force a return to office on them with little notice in spring 2022, Hunter — with support from AWU — was able to quickly organize the rest of the office in protest. Suddenly, everyone saw the point of a union:. “We went from only one person being involved to having 70% of the office in support in about eight weeks,” Hunter told me. The petition successfully encouraged Cognizant to postpone return to office for three months. That three-month deadline is now approaching, and the group is planning a renewed opposition.

“Organizing a group of workers around a very specific demand has been very successful,” said Parul Koul, the executive chair of AWU and a Google software engineer. A small group of Google Fiber contractors voted to form a union with AWU’s support in March; contractors for Modis Engineering, who help run Google’s vast data center network, have won concessions from Modis on organizing rights and hazard pay.

“This massive system, there are tens of thousands of workers that are part of it that are all experiencing variations of the same issue. This is really a campaign that is going to be coming out in the next few months, uniting the different workplaces and employers and job roles under that entire system,” Koul said.