A group of Google employees in the United States has formed a union, they announce today. It is one of the first unions in Silicon Valley.
The union will deal with issues such as wages or working conditions and ethical issues, the founders said.
By grouping themselves, they hope in the first place to put pressure on the management to enforce changes. Some 226 employees and engineers working for the technology giant have already indicated that they want to join. The union was christened ‘Alphabet Workers Union’.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, employs 130,000 people worldwide. A union within the technology sector is relatively rare.
After all, it often concerns well-paid jobs at attractive conditions. But in recent years, tensions at Google have increased. For example, there were already protests about how the company tackled sexual harassment or about the cooperation with the American government on, border policy.
Recently there was the dismissal of an African-American researcher, which sparked a lot of outrage internally.
