Nearly 1,400 employees of Google’s parent company Alphabet have signed a petition calling for better treatment of employees during the layoff process after the company announced it would cut 12,000 jobs.
In an open letter to Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai, employees made a number of demands on the company, including freezing new hires, seeking voluntary redundancies rather than redundancies, prioritizing laid-off employees over vacancies, and hiring employees . Paid time off, such as parental leave and bereavement leave.
The employees also urged Alphabet to avoid firing workers from countries with active conflicts or humanitarian crises, such as Ukraine, and to provide additional support to those at risk of losing their visa-bound residency with their lost jobs.
“The impact of Alphabet’s decision to reduce headcount is global,” the letter said. “Nowhere has the voice of the workers been given due consideration, and we know that as workers we are stronger together than alone.”
The petition follows Alphabet’s announcement in January that it would cut about 6% of its workforce following pressure from investors to cut spending in the post-pandemic recession. Meta Platforms, Amazon.com and Microsoft are among the other tech giants that have downsized in recent months after years of growth and hiring.
An Alphabet spokesperson did not immediately comment on the petition. When Pichai announced the job cuts on Jan. 20, he told employees in an email that the company was hiring for a “different economic reality than the one we face today” and that he “takes full responsibility.”
While some Googlers, particularly in the US, lost their jobs immediately, the process was much slower for those in countries with stricter employment protections common in Europe. Googlers in Switzerland, for example, only learned this week which workers were being laid off, leading to a strike on Wednesday.
The letter was organized by a group of workers supported by trade unions, including the Alphabet Workers Union, United Tech and Allied Workers and UNI Global. It grew out of discussions about a Discord channel that was set up after the positions were announced.
Union groups have helped organize several petitions about the layoffs at various Google entities and in different countries where Google has a presence.
Some signatories to the petition have expressed concern to Bloomberg that consultation processes, which are required by law in some countries, have become a mandatory exercise. Employee feedback to management, including survey results in which people expressed interest in volunteering for layoffs or short-time work, was not considered, they said.
The employees plan to keep the petition circulating for a few more days before showing a physical copy to Pichai at Google’s California headquarters.
Source: LA Times