Google lays off contractors who unionized last month | Engadget
Google lays off contractors who unionized last month | Engadget
Around 80 Google Help subcontractors who recently voted to unionize with the Alphabet Workers Union-Communications Workers of America (AWU-CWA) found out last week that they will be laid off.
“We had exercised our right to organize as members of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA in order to bring both Google and Accenture, a Google subcontractor, to the bargaining table to negotiate on several key demands, including layoff protections.”
Google only started accepting contractors and recruiters because they were expanding before the pandemic. They probably wanted to get rid of both of those anyway.
They will show through internal communication that this was planned all along. Any retaliation protection this union thought they had doesn't exist.
Google has been using Accenture for decades and would have continued to do so.
Union busting in this matter has been proven to be a crime that will not be prosecuted and therefore, it is rampant and flagrant.
Accenture and Google's relationship has changed throughout the years. They are partners in cloud services. I'm not sure what their role is in other divisions though.
I guess they didn't get enough employees/contractors on-board with the unionization.
Right. The lesson Google is teaching is that everyone should unionize, not just some of us.
Didn't they file a complaint with the labor board and were reinstated with back pay?
I support unionising in general but not for contractors. By definition contractors have agreed to do short term work according to a specific contract. Trying to negotiate the contract later seems dishonest. That’s a very different to a regular long-term open-ended employment contract where unionising makes sense.
The "contractors" are W-2 employees, they're employed by an external agency rather than by Google itself. This agency then contracts to provide services to Google. It's a bit like if a building outsources their janitorial to A1 Cleaning Services Corp, and then A1's employees unionize. The thing is then it might be legal for the building to cancel the A1 contract, and then for A1 to fire all their employees due to the lost contract, and then for the building to hire A2 to do the same thing. This is a loophole in union busting laws.