For the second year in a row, my coworkers and I at Google have spent the month of January reeling from sudden, massive layoffs. This is new.
During its first two decades of existence, Google carefully cultivated the impression that it’s a great place to work. Its founders insisted they were upending the status quo of what working in the corporate world looked like. The press and the public were enamored with the color scheme, the bean bag chairs, happy hours, on-site laundry and yoga class, and the regular Q&A sessions with the CEO. Remember “The Internship”?
This image may still hold sway in the public imagination, but inside the company things have changed, definitively and for the worse. And there is no end in sight.
Our friends and coworkers are having their lives upended by late-night emails after a year in which Alphabet’s stock rose 52 percent and the company did $70 million in stock buybacks. Recent reports place Alphabet’s cash reserves at $118 billion. We make Google a lot of money, yet time and again we wake up and read in the press that our colleagues are being laid off en masse for the vaguest of reasons.
Leadership has offered little explanation for the layoffs to those of us who remain on the job, or any indication of when they intend to stop eliminating roles by the hundreds and thousands. It’s clear that we, the workers, are being made to pay for the mistakes of management. We don’t structure the company or produce its financial projections. We build the products and services that make the company profitable in the first place.
Meanwhile, we come to work and see the chaos, frustration and instability that these layoffs leave in their wake. The generalized fear that your entire team might be the next to vanish overnight is not great for productivity and innovation. We watch with heavy hearts as our former colleagues struggle to find new jobs in an ever-tightening market for tech workers.
That market keeps getting tighter because this corporate practice of rolling layoffs isn’t just happening at Google. It’s happening at Meta, Amazon and software companies large and small, in Silicon Valley and tech hubs around the world. This is an industry-wide problem.
Very few, if any, of the workers laid off in the tech industry recently were covered by a union contract — and neither are the overwhelming majority of those still working in the industry. Until that changes, workers will continue to lose their jobs by the thousands without having any say over it.
As the president of Alphabet Workers United-Communications Workers of America, I know how hard it can seem to change this state of affairs, to win a majority of your coworkers to the cause of negotiating together against some of the largest businesses in the world. At AWU-CWA we have been blazing new ground as the first wall-to-wall union at a major U.S. technology company.
We’ve had wins, like getting contractors reinstated who were illegally fired for speaking out about the harms of AI training work, pushing Google to commit to ending caste discrimination, and winning back-wages for data center workers who had been denied COVID-19 hazard pay. Yet after three years of hard work and organizing, we still have a long fight ahead of us to negotiate our first contract with Google. And we are still the only union at a major U.S. tech corporation.
This generation’s tech giants were built on the premise that maintaining a happy workforce drives innovation, which in turn drives profit. It’s a myth that for too long has kept us, as technology workers, from organizing and acting collectively in our own interest. This has left us all painfully vulnerable to the new reality of sweeping layoffs, replacement of roles with temp and contract workers who don’t receive nearly the benefits and compensation they deserve, and the growing corporate enthusiasm around artificial intelligence.
Just this week Google announced it was ending its contract with thousands of Appen workers who ensure the safety of its search and AI products. As the author Cory Doctorow recently wrote, “We’re nowhere near [AI] stealing your job, we are certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails [at] doing your job.”
What can we do to stop it? At this time, tech workers are at the mercy of their employers, who have proven themselves to be merciless. If you walk into your boss’ office tomorrow and demand an end to layoffs, or even try to negotiate the terms of any future layoff, blank stares and vague platitudes are the best you can hope for.
The only way that we can negotiate and win is when we come together to do so collectively. Which is why, if you’re a tech worker, you need to start having conversations with your coworkers about what you are going to do. If you work at Google, you’re in luck because there is already a union to join. At any other major technology company in the U.S., you’re going to have to build one. It can be done, and it is your right to do so.
The industry is changing. And we, as the rank-and-file workers who make our companies’ success possible, need to change with it. We need to win the power to tell corporate leadership that we are not expendable, in terms they can hear and understand.
In the last year we have been inspired to see workers in other industries — autoworkers, writers, actors, video game workers, UPS drivers and more — take on their bosses and win. At AWU-CWA we will keep fighting until we can successfully protect one another from the worst impulses of management and force Google to do right by its workers. You can fight for job protections too, and now! Until then, stay tuned for the next round of layoffs.
Parul Koul is a Google software engineer and president of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA.