Over 4,500 Google workers have signed a petition calling for layoff protections in response to tech giant workforce cuts over the past few months. According to The Guardian, the union-led petition calls for guaranteed severance, buyouts before mandatory layoffs, and the option to take severance as extended paid leave.
Employees reportedly chanted “Google, Google, you can’t hide, we can see your greedy side” at a Thursday press conference. The workers referenced Google parent company Alphabet’s mass layoffs in 2023, while reports indicate the company has been quietly laying off staff in certain divisions this year.
After delivering the petition to the office of CEO Sundar Pichai, Parul Koul, the president of the Alphabet Workers Union, said: “This is a company enjoying massive, unprecedented success… these layoffs and cuts are not difficult decisions, but simply profit being put over the people that make this company run.”
The petition was left with a staff member at Pichai’s office, and Koul states that the workers were “greeted with closed doors and no response for the most part.” However, the staff member said they would deliver it to the Google and Alphabet chief, and that it was “the largest piece of employee feedback that Google had received about job security.”
The petition also calls for an end to performance ratings of employees, which workers say relies on quotas hit, rather than being based on individual merit.
(Image credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The protections call comes directly after mass layoffs at Microsoft, where 3,200 employees were announced to be put out of work, 1,600 at the time of announcement and 1,600 set to follow over the next financial year. Meta, meanwhile, laid off 8,000 employees earlier this year, while Oracle laid off 21,000 of its staff over a 12-month period.
Many job cuts across the tech industry are attributed to gains in efficiency from AI, with Oracle’s annual report stating that “deployment of AI technologies across our operations [has] resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.”
Google’s market cap valuation has quadrupled over the past six years, and currently sits at an estimated $4.3 trillion. The company, like just about all tech giants at this point, is thoroughly invested in AI—although Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, seems convinced that AI-related job cuts are not inevitable.
“From my point of view, from DeepMind and Google’s point of view, if engineers are becoming three or four times more productive, then we just [want to] do three or four times more stuff,” the DeepMind chief said earlier this year, criticizing companies looking to replace engineers with AI as having “a lack of imagination”.
Imagination or not, it seems the Alphabet Workers Union is taking no chances.
