Behind the scenes, Google’s many employees around the world are now working to build one of the biggest global unions ever assembled, in order to represent this distributed workforce worldwide and deal with rumors of harassment and retaliation brought forward by some employees in recent years.
Reuters reports that an initial project to partner the nascent Alphabet Worker’s Union with the established Commercial Workers of America (CWA) has now spiraled into a movement going beyond North American borders.
The Google union effort plans to work with something called the UNI Global Union, which has 20 million worker members in 150 different countries, in such diverse sectors as finance, entertainment and tourism. The UNI has 50 agreements in place with multinationals and Google workers hope to trade on that structure to integrate their employer into a unionized environment.
The idea that workers can unionize across national boundaries is relatively new, and an interesting response to globalism as a capital practice.
Google’s union also represents the movement of unionization activity from industrial to information society – in the past, we’ve tended to think of American unions as related to the auto industry or other manufacturing sectors.
What will come of this post-industrial union? That depends, to some extent, on how broader pro-union efforts try to move the needle on long-established American cultural reactions to unions as a whole.
“If (the union effort) grows — which Google will do everything they can to prevent — it could have huge impacts not just for the workers but for the broader issues that we are all thinking about in terms of tech power in society,” says Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, in a New York Times story Jan. 4.
Others also note the elephant in the room: the reluctance of powerful companies to cede power to unions willingly.
“Google might well succeed in decimating any organization that comes to the floor.” says Nelson Lichtenstein, the director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the same coverage.
Then there’s the shareholder … if you have related holdings, think about your position and your philosophy and how your portfolio complements it.