Google might be one of the wealthiest corporations in the world, but that doesn’t mean the multi-trillion-dollar company won’t resort to downsizing.
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.”
Source: https://futurism.com/something-bad-inside-google-labor
