4,500 Google Workers Signed a Petition. Their Union Can’t Bargain for a Single One of Them

That doesn’t make the petition less protected.

On July 16, more than 100 workers rallied outside Google’s Mountain View headquarters. The Alphabet Workers Union delivered a petition signed by over 4,500 workers to Sundar Pichai and three other senior executives.

They want guaranteed severance, voluntary exit packages written into formal policy, the option to take severance as extended paid leave so healthcare and immigration status survive the exit, and the end of GRAD, Google’s bell-curve performance review system.

AWU president Parul Koul: “These layoffs and cuts are not difficult decisions, but simply profit being put over the people that make this company run.”

Google declined to comment. Pichai didn’t meet with them — they got a staffer.

The Alphabet Workers Union is a minority union. It launched in January 2021 with the Communications Workers of America, it is not NLRB-certified at Alphabet, and it cannot compel Google to bargain over any of this. Google has no duty to sit down with it at all.

Plenty of executives would read that sentence and conclude the whole thing is theater with no legal consequence. Wrong.

Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act protects employees who act together for mutual aid or protection. It says nothing about certification. It says nothing about whether a union is on the property. A group of employees circulating a petition about severance, layoff protection, and a performance rating system is about as squarely protected as concerted activity gets.

Discipline someone for signing it and you have an 8(a)(1) charge with no certified union anywhere in the picture.

For employers: the absence of a union does not mean the absence of the NLRA. Your managers need to know that before the next petition circulates, not during the investigation.

Right now, somewhere, a manager is being told “we’re not union, we can handle this however we want.” Wrong, again.

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