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They planned the secret project during their lunch breaks.

At the beginning, in January 2020, the small group met on the company premises.

Later, when the pandemic broke out, everything was discussed via video.

The employees only let in colleagues they trusted, after all, their bosses shouldn't know anything.

For more than a year they recruited fellow campaigners, calculated budgets, and consulted with lawyers.

This week they presented the result: the Alphabet Workers Union, AWU for short - a union.

"With the AWU," says founding member Dylan Baker to WELT, "we are making history." Alphabet is the mother of Google - so for the first time the employees of a large American tech company are organizing.

Google's AWU will not be a traditional union

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The AWU has only a few hundred members so far, but it could become a model in Silicon Valley.

The companies that pretend to make the world a better place have been fighting workers' rights for decades - but how long can they hold out now that Google itself has a union?

The AWU is not a classic trade union, Baker and the others do not advocate higher wages and better working conditions.

Alphabet pays well, even young employees earn more than $ 100,000 a year.

And before the pandemic, they could eat, drink, exercise, and get their hair cut for free on the Google campus in California.

The 120,000 Alphabet employees do not have the worries that concern auto mechanics or steel caster.

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So what does the AWU want?

“We demand,” says Baker, “that Google act according to the ideals of the employees.” His colleague Nicki Anselmo sees it similarly.

“The new union should ensure,” she explains, “that our values ​​are respected.”

Tech employees care about equality and the use of technology for good causes.

They are demanding a return to Google's early motto “don't be evil”.

According to Anselmo, three key words led to the founding of the AWU: Andy Rubin, Timnit Gebru and Maven.

In recent years, Alphabet employees have repeatedly instigated revolts.

They protested the $ 90 million settlement that Andy Rubin, creator of the Android operating system, is said to have received after he apparently left Google on allegations of sexual harassment.

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They collected signatures against the dismissal of researcher Timnit Gebru, who accused Google's algorithms of discrimination.

And they forced the company to withdraw from the Maven project, in which artificial intelligence was supposed to evaluate satellite photos for the US military.

Rubin, Gebru, Maven - the three incidents created a rift between management and the workforce.

"We have experienced," says Anselmo, "that Alphabet only reacts when we build pressure together."

The AWU should now give structure to the spontaneous protests.

It has everything that exists in traditional trade unions: committees, officials, contributions.

The members undertake to pay one percent of their annual salary.

Baker, Anselmo and their colleagues only have to put Alphabet under public pressure

In fact, the AWU is a so-called minority union.

This means that she cannot negotiate any collective agreements for Alphabet employees, and cannot have a say in wages, working hours and vacation entitlement.

Baker, Anselmo and their colleagues only have to put the company under public pressure.

Minority unions are not uncommon in the US.

They usually arise where traditional employee organizations have no chance.

American labor law stipulates that at least half of employees must vote in favor of forming a union - a threshold that is not reached in many Internet companies.

Most recently, the employees of the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and the software company Glitch organized themselves.

Now, with the merger of Google engineers, Big Tech has a union too.

Hardly anywhere else are unions as weak as in Silicon Valley.

Because the tech elite have felt little need to organize up to now.

And because the few programmers who dared fear retaliation.

Google is said to have demoted the initiators of the protests against the severance payments for Andy Rubin.

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In addition, it is said that the US management consultancy IRI Consultants, which specializes in the fight against unions, has been hired.

The National Labor Relations Board wrote in a report a few weeks ago that Google is monitoring its employees and preventing them from engaging in union activities.

In the future, Google will probably be more cautious.

The company is unlikely to take action against the AWU, at least not in the near future, because that could end in a PR disaster.

After the union was formed, Google said it had always tried to create a good work environment.

"Our employees," it continues, "have rights that we support."

But the management will continue to contact the staff directly - an indication that Google does not recognize the AWU as an official representative of the workforce.

In other industries, the unions are more powerful.

In 2019, for example, the automaker General Motors experienced a 40-day strike.

48,000 members of the United Auto Workers went on strike and 50 factories stood still.

The demands differed significantly from those of the Google programmers.

It was not a moral concern of the assembly line workers, although General Motors also manufactures for the US military.

They wanted - quite classic - more money and better protection against dismissal.

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