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On the Clock is Motherboard's reporting on the organized labor movement, gig work, automation, and the future of work.
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In the lead-up to the election, 100 percent of workers in the bargaining unit signed union authorization cards. Until these Google Fiber workers voted to unionize, the National Labor Relations Board did not recognize the Alphabet Workers Union, which launched in early 2021 to organize employees, temps, vendors, and contractors of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. To date, the Alphabet Workers Union has been a so-called minority union that represents a fraction of workers at the company. As a whole, roughly 900 of Google’s 260,000 workers belong to AWU-CWA and pay union dues. “Since our founding we have been committed to tackling Alphabet’s segregative, two-tiered employment system,” Andrew Gainer-Dewar, a Google software engineer Cambridge, MA and member of AWU-CWA, said in a statement “Alphabet wants to maintain its reputation for treating its workers well but doesn't want to pay for it. Instead, the trillion dollar corporation relies on temporary, contract and vendor workers to provide essential work for the company without the same pay, benefits or rights as full time employees.”The Google Fiber workers in Kansas City follow in the footsteps of Google contractors in Pittsburgh who voted to form one of the first tech workers’ unions in the country in 2019 with the US Steelworkers. Their contractor HCL has since been accused of shipping union jobs overseas to Poland.Do you have a tip to share about Google? Please get in touch with Lauren Kaori Gurley, the reporter, via email lauren.gurley@vice.com or securely on Signal 201-897-2109.