Something Bad Is Brewing Inside Google
Over the last year or so, employees in the once-ironclad tech sector have watched in horror as waves of layoffs ravaged their offices and sent wages tumbling.
Bracing for cuts after annual performance reviews on Tuesday, over 1,300 Google employees signed a petition organized by the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU)— the labor union covering Google's parent corporation, Alphabet — requesting changes to the company's policy.
Those include guaranteed severance for every laid-off employee, an offer of voluntary layoffs backed by those severance packages, and an end to Google's performance review system which has pulled double-duty as a mass layoff machine.
"Ongoing rounds of layoffs make us feel insecure about our jobs," read the petition. "The company is clearly in a strong financial position, making the loss of so many valuable colleagues without explanation hurt even more."
Google's response was to turn around and give the petitioners what they asked for. Yesterday, the tech conglomerate announced a "voluntary exit program" for US employees in its Platforms and Devices group — the workers responsible for products like Pixel, Android, Chrome, Fitbit, and Nest. But the AWU notes a one-time offer does not change the long-term employee outlook.
"We are happy to see material progress in response to our concerns," Google software engineer and AWU union organizing chair Alan McAvinney told Futurism, "but we continue to demand that Google commit to practices like offers of voluntary buyouts and fair terms of severance by codifying them in its actual written policies."
The offer allegedly spins in a severance package, according to 9to5Google, which viewed the memo.
Though layoffs have reportedly slowed as AI-hyped investments in tech skyrocket, correlation does not equal causation.
In January of last year, Google switched the organizational models used in its hardware teams, in a shuffle that resulted in a few hundred layoffs. A few months later, Google merged its Android team with its newly sorted hardware teams, revealing the company's quest to reorganize around — you guessed it — AI.
"By combining teams," Google SVP Rick Osterloh told The Verge last year, "Google can now move much faster to integrate AI across all of its products."
And Google certainly has moved faster, posting a 15 percent revenue gain in the third quarter of 2023 with a profit of $26.3 billion. Despite this, the company has increasingly turned to outsourcing to fine-tune its AI products — dumping off its labor costs while pumping cash into speculative AI projects.
Ultimately, it's Google's employees who bear the brunt of friction from that strategy: full-time employees see their responsibilities increase as job security drops, while contract workers who clean up Google's AI products earn a fraction of their peers, often without benefits or the privilege of union representation.
As Google ups the ante on shady labor practices despite sky-high profit, employees are demanding lasting and substantive change — not just one-off "voluntary exit" offers.
More on labor: Top AI Investor Says Goal Is to Crash Human Wages
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