Today, Explained - Okay, Google: unionize!

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

A very big tech company now has a very small union. Recode’s Shirin Ghaffary explains why highly paid workers in an anti-union industry still organized and made history. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Okay, Google, is the Alphabet Company going to unionize? On the website, theverge.com, they say, roughly 230 Google employees announced they were forming a union with the communications workers of America. The biggest tech news in the country, maybe the world, is the deplatforming of President Trump

and the violent, hateful factions of his MAGA mob. But the second biggest tech news, totally overshadowed by the first, is that Google employees formed a union. On January 4th, the first Monday of the year, over 200 Google employees came out and said they had formed a union. Shereen Ghaffari is a tech reporter at Recode. This was a huge deal in tech. Google workers have been launching these kind of like one-off activism campaigns over issues they care about, whether that's Google doing business with the military, and many people were against that, or how they treat contractors. But on that day when the union came out, it was the first time

that there was actually a formal group being organized who were full-time employees. These are engineers, project managers, people who are important at the company coming out and saying that they are organizing. 200 union members isn't much considering that the Google workforce is what, like tens of thousands? Oh yeah, it's over 100,000 full-time employees and even more contractors. So, you know, yes, it's a small number, but it's growing already. I think by today, it is now around 700 people. So we'll see. Okay, well, let's talk about how this happened. Well, I mean, the tensions at Google go back deep for the past couple of years, really. You know, this company that once was a startup with the

motto, don't be evil, and this culture of letting employees debate and question every single decision, that's changed because Google has become a bigger company now and employees have started to realize that they don't always have the final say, that there have been some decisions that management has just made in private and has not backed down to employee concerns. And that's caused a lot of upset within the company. So when did Google's old mantra, don't be evil, start to become a problem? I would say in the past five to 10 years,

Google has really matured, right? From this startup culture to really big corporation culture. And I think that's where you're seeing this tension come from. And then just the actions that Google has taken in firing several prominent employees who were raising concerns within the company. Artificial intelligence, drones, warfare, and Google. It's a mixture that caused an uproar inside the tech giant where the early motto was don't be evil. In 2019, Google really started to kind of ramp up their efforts to

rein in company culture, right? And you see them starting to say, hey, there were certain employees who were upset with Google's decision to work with, for example, the U.S. government on providing AI technology potentially to be used in warfare. The employees are outraged Google's technology could be used by the Pentagon's Project Maven to better identify both targets and civilians. And so Google employees started sending out letters, started calling on the head of AI research to back off from this project. And it was a huge kind of scandal internally because this project was supposed to be a secret at that time. It was called Project Maven. Some news here on Google, CNBC confirming with a source that Google cloud

chief Diane Green did tell employees today that the company will not seek to renew a controversial contract with the Department of Defense after it expires. You know, it was discovered that Google was working on another secret project. Codenamed Dragonfly. Dragonfly was a censored version of its search engine for China. That would actually omit certain words the Chinese government didn't like. And so today, the New York Times broke the news about a protest letter signed by 1,400 employees. They wanted to, quote, raise urgent moral and ethical issues, saying, Currently, we do not have the information required to make ethically informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment.

We urgently need more transparency, a seat at the table, and a commitment to clear and open processes. Google employees need to know what we're building. There's just been this kind of cascade of many and large and in-between kind of employee tensions and scandals at Google over these controversial projects that Google was working on over alleged sexual harassment around the Me Too kind of time. Staff at Google are walking off the job today. It is happening all across this Google Earth. They're protesting the company's treatment of women, and they're demanding big changes in how sexual misconduct allegations are handled by the company. Really, the kinds of issues that people have been debating at Google run the gamut. But I think some of the most interesting ones for Google are around what

kind of work should Google be doing? So it sounds like what you're saying, Shereen, is that this union at Google is much more about having power and a voice in sort of the company's decisions and its politics than say, you know, we need better paternal care and, you know, better health benefits. I think for Google's tech employees, for those full-time engineers and designers and product managers who make the tools that we use every day, those people are generally paid pretty well. They have good benefits. Google has been renowned for kind of setting the high bar in Silicon Valley for having luxurious kind of amenities at work, like gourmet

food and all that. So no, this is not for those tech workers. I don't think this is about the wages and the kind of bread and butter stuff that a normal union campaign would be about. However, Google kind of has this what's been called shadow workforce or sort of a second class of workforce. And that are its contractors, what it calls its TVCs. And these people, you know, they range from cafeteria workers to janitors to shuttle bus drivers that take the Google employees around from San Francisco to their suburban headquarters. And they also have contractors who do data entry and even computer programming. And those people are not getting necessarily paid the kinds of high salaries and having the same kinds of benefits that you might expect. Also, content moderators, right, which we've talked about on the show a bunch.

Absolutely. Content moderators are huge. And they're sometimes the ones watching these, you know, extremely kind of traumatizing material out there that Google doesn't necessarily want to show up in their results. So those people I don't want to minimize. Yes, this union, the first kind of batch of people who are coming out and saying we're in this union, they are tech workers, they are people who are paid well. And for them, probably what makes them tick isn't necessarily isn't pay or isn't working conditions. But there is this whole other kind of class of people at Google who they are trying to include in this union to who do have those more kind of traditional issues around pay and working conditions. Has anything like this ever happened in Silicon Valley in big tech?

No, not at a major tech company in a very long time. But there have been efforts within Google and some other tech companies to unionize, but it's largely been either kind of contractors, like for example, thousands, I believe over 2,000 cafeteria workers unionized back in 2019 at Google. And I actually broke that story. They were employed by a third party though, right? So they weren't directly employed by Google. And they formed a more traditional union that also represents cafeteria workers at other big tech companies and such. There have also been kind of these smaller efforts by some white collar contractors for Google in Pittsburgh. They work for a third party as well.

But at Google or at Facebook or at Amazon or the FANG companies that we call the major tech companies of our time today, no. There has not been any kind of white collar tech worker union to come out and formally say we're a union. At this point, there's, what, like 700 or something of Google's 250,000 or so employees in this union, and these are largely white-collar tech employees. How much muscle do they really have with such a small group? Well, they're going to need strength in numbers. I mean, any union is only as strong as its members. And so, you know, whether it's Google's new union is called a minority union, which is

less common than a traditional kind of majority union. And what that means is that because it doesn't have, it hasn't carved out a little section of Google employees, like let's say all Google engineers in Northern California, and then said, hey, we have a majority of these engineers in California with our union. They don't have that kind of structure yet. They're not actually protected by labor law in the sense that they can't get Google's management to come to the bargaining table. If they did have that majority and they did have this official NLRB vote, then Google would have to actually negotiate a contract and they would have more formal leverage. The way that this minority union works now is that they can just basically pressure Google management because they can say, hey, we're backing up this employee who was

raising concerns and has now been fired. I mean, when I saw this news last week, I texted a good friend of mine and said, hey, man, you got a union. Look at that. And he was like, what? Huh? Did I miss something? He didn't even know that Google had it.

I am serious. Wow. I'm not going to, you know, blow up his spot or anything. But could the Google union have maybe picked a better week to announce their historic organization? It just feels like the first week of the year, even before they knew about the insurrection, we were in the middle of a presidential transition. Did they sort of set themselves up to fail by launching on a week that had so much news that this just became totally buried? Could they have picked a slower news week to announce this? Yes. The fact that they already existed by the time this mess took place, they were able to come out

and sort of show, hey, this is the kind of thing that as a union, we're going to take a stance on whether or not our company kind of waffles or takes time to decide, we're going to come out almost immediately and say, this is what we think Google should do. What did they say? So the Google union came out just the day after the mob and said that they condemned what happened and they find Google and its parent company Alphabet squarely responsible for this because they think that it has not done enough to stop the hate, harassment, discrimination, and radicalization from growing on YouTube. And remember, Google owns YouTube, and they see the company as enabling the kind of extremism that led to the violence we saw at the Capitol. And they

demanded that the company take more action that they, you know, de platform Trump and more deeply kind of address this, this what they see is this rod at the core of the platform. So we've been removing thousands of videos, including videos from President Trump's channel, if he found them to be violative. And we have clear, consistent policies. Content moderation, obviously, is about identifying content at scale and removing it before people can see it.

We reduce the spread. You know, we don't recommend or promote content which we think is violative. So YouTube did end up temporarily suspending Trump for at least seven days, which was more than they did initially, which was just take down a single video where he had seemingly encouraged the insurrectionists. Was that all because of the union? I don't think we can say that. I think the union was one of many groups, though, that was pressuring Google and YouTube immensely to take action. And remember, YouTube was actually one of the last major social media platforms to temporarily ban Trump's account. Facebook and Twitter did it first. So, you know, there is this question of, you know, is this union providing pressure and would YouTube have been even slower without it? I think we don't know the answer yet without being behind the scenes and to Google executives thinking on this. But I think we can certainly say

that these employees are coming out and taking much firmer moral stances and definitive action than the company after this event. Okay, so the union started out in the 200s. Now it's at 700 or so. And then it had a very big week with this insurrection and the role Google or YouTube may have played in enabling any part of it. Does that mean it's here to stay? Or could Google executives still try and just get rid of these unionized employees? There is a chance they could try that. They have hired, you know, kind of union busting consulting firm in the past. They have fired employees who have been active in worker organizing before.

I will say that even though this is a non-traditional, kind of more informal union, you do have some rights under labor law, no matter what, in the U.S. So you are supposed to, as a worker, be able to organize your employees without fear of retaliation. Your employer legally should not be retaliating against you if you want to form a union. There's a lot of attention on this news because Silicon Valley is known as an anti-union culture, right? For decades, Silicon Valley has made it its competitive advantage to be sort of anti-union over the east coast right there's there's this idea that if you're a tech engineer you shouldn't unionize because you're better than that you don't need a union you're smart you're

well paid and that unionization is a form of bureaucracy that gets in the way of innovation that has been the driving ethos of the culture around labor rights in Silicon Valley since Intel. So the news that now one of the most prominent tech companies has staff that is unionizing who are engineers, that's huge. Support for Today Explained Thank you. Wirecutter AuraFrame to make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple.

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Okay, Google. Is Google going to unionize? Sorry, I don't understand. But I found something similar. Do you want to know whether employees can be fired for trying to unionize? Yes.

On the website ZipRecruiter.com, they say, the simple answer is no. Shereen, what is it with Silicon Valley and unions? Is it like you're better than that? Or is it like we would really appreciate if you did do that because we're terrified of organized labor? It's both. I mean, I think it's a smart kind of marketing strategy to say, hey, if you're management, to say you're better than that, you don't need a union, why would you need someone to slow you down? And, you know, it's true. Unions are an organized structure, right? And so if you're averse to structure and you're an engineer, maybe that appeals to you. And I don't want to discount that as that's legitimately

maybe the belief that some people in tech have. Intel co-founder Robert Noyce once said, remaining non-union is essential for survival for most of our companies. This attitude, right, that goes back to the 70s, 80s, really early kind of computer era. And has it just been an attitude or sort of a mantra, or has there been some, you know, old-fashioned union busting in Silicon Valley too? There has been old-fashioned union busting. Google hired a known consulting firm involved in union busting. Amazon reportedly, according to documents advice reported on, hired a Pinkerton, straight-up Pinkerton. So that's old school, same firm that's in your history books, right? Known for union

busting back in the day. I don't like the Pinkertons. They're muscle for the bosses. To surveil workers in Europe who are unionizing. Surveillance efforts? I would call it surveillance efforts. I mean, they track things at these warehouse sites, right? So apparently, Amazon has been trying to hire what they describe as intelligence analysts to keep track of activists and union organizers in their latest documented attempt to make sure that their workers do not have the tiniest glimmer of a shred of hope of power within their own workplace. They track how many people have been interested in unionizing. They track how many people have been written up for defying management and things that you could see easily relate to labor

organizing. Open Markets Institute is out with a new report detailing Amazon's aggressive surveillance technique. So according to that report, when you enter an Amazon warehouse, you're scanned and you're screened and you're forced to hand over all of your personal belongings. Security cameras, watch your every movement.

Warehouse workers actually wear monitors so that their literal every movement is tracked. Creepy. Many people think that and, you know, Amazon and some others have said, well, they're just making sure their business can run and they're just making sure we can all get our shipments on time and you can't have chaos at the warehouse if you want those Christmas packages to come at your door. And for Google, you know, you can't have billions of people searching the web if you're fighting

over every single decision every day. And I mean, Google, you know, has access to our emails, to our search queries. I mean, are they using their technological advantage to surveil its employees who want to unionize? We don't know for sure. The National Labor Relations Board in the U.S., they have cited Google for allegedly monitoring their workers in what they say is likely an illegal way. Back in 2019, Bloomberg also reported that Google had plans to build a Chrome extension on employees' browsers that would keep tabs on if they were creating calendar invitations. The concern is that this tool, it's a new extension for the Chrome browser that's used internally. This one sends up a red flag when somebody organizes a meeting that occupies a certain number of rooms or involves a certain number of people. Once it reaches that threshold, I think it's 10 rooms, 100 people.

The concern, the question is, is this an attempt to tamp down organizing, to kind of keep us from, you know, raising protests? Whoa. Google disputes this, yeah, and says it wasn't for that. Google has said to us, look, the memo misinterprets this. This is something that we've put in place to cut down on meeting spam, misuse of space, things along those lines. It's this very blurry line of, is my employer just doing their normal standard corporate thing where they have access to all my work tools? Or are they nefariously using this to make sure I don't start a union? One thing recently that really aggravated employees

and has kind of set fire to this movement again of tech worker organizing at Google is that a star AI researcher named Timnit Gabrou, who was one of the few, if only, Black women employees at Google on the AI research team, she says she was fired by Google for trying to publish controversial research that was critical of bias in Google's algorithms. When someone has issues with your

paper, you have a conversation about it, especially if it's internal. If they had some sort of PR or policy risk, then the PR and policy people had a chance to talk to us about our paper because we gave them a heads up before we even wrote our paper and we added them to the documents. So to have somebody just to give you an order to retract your paper with no further discussions is extremely disrespectful to researchers. Google says that she resigned by her own will and that she had certain conditions that they couldn't meet. I did not resign. I believe I was fired. So this enraged employees, many of them sided with Tim Neat. And that, I think, has really pushed this activism stuff at Google, which had been relatively quiet for the past year, I would say. it pushed it back to the forefront of workers' minds.

And I think that's part of the reason why you're seeing this union announcement come out right now. Google workers still feel like they have a target on their back if they speak out about concerns at the company. That's how many Google workers feel. And they're hoping that with this union, they can kind of organize and be more of a unified front and not be as much of individual targets. And this union is being founded at the exact time where there's more scrutiny than ever from the United States government, from European governments on Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple. Is it possible that this transcends Google and that you see more organization at Apple or Facebook or Amazon? I think that when workers at Google do something, it sends a message to all the other tech workers in the industry. Everyone's looking at Google.

And people who work at Facebook, it's just a couple miles away from Google's headquarters. Of course, everyone's working at home right now because of the pandemic, but they all follow each other on Twitter. They're all following this news. Maybe not your friend, though. But the ones who are plugged in to worker activism, they are noticing. And I think there's been months of relative quiet and we're starting to see the floodgates open again around worker activism in the Valley. Shereen Ghaffari covers tech at Recode. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. Again, a hundred times. Oh, I forgot you have to deal with this new union stuff.

It's okay. I'll just ask DuckDuckGo or something. Goodbye, everybody.