For years, working at Google was perceived as an entry ticket to the most desirable workplace in the world: High salaries, lavish campuses, and the promise of a long career. For thousands of employees, this dream no longer feels secure.
In recent days, more than 4,500 employees signed a petition calling on management to grant them protection from layoffs. On Thursday, about a hundred employees gathered outside the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, holding signs reading “Google employees for job security,” and delivered the petition to Sundar Pichai and other senior executives.
The employees are not asking for a commitment that there will be no future layoffs, but rather a more predictable and fair process: To know in advance what will happen on the day their name is placed on the list.
The petition demands a guaranteed minimum severance package for every laid-off worker, identical to the one offered during the large wave of layoffs in January 2023, as well as for the company to first offer voluntary departure before moving to forced layoffs. Another demand: The abolition of quotas in the GRAD performance evaluation system, so that ratings reflect actual performance rather than a need to pre-allocate a fixed number of low and high scores.
The employees also ask to receive severance as an extended period of paid employment instead of a lump sum – this is particularly significant in the US, where many workers depend on company health insurance or a work visa.
The struggle stems from the wave of layoffs in January 2023, in which about 12,000 employees were fired, and since then cuts and downsizings have continued in units such as Google Cloud. At the same time, Google continues to invest vast capital in artificial intelligence, a gap that fuels frustration: Not a company struggling for survival, but one of the strongest in the world, choosing to invest in technology while its employees fear who is next in line.
Parul Koul, president of the Alphabet Workers Union, argued that the cuts stem from prioritizing profits over the people who run the company, calling the petition the broadest expression to date of employees’ concern for their security.
In the past, Google employees staged protests over sexual harassment, military contracts, and tech ethics. This time the struggle is personal: Not over a product or its impact, but over their own future: A sign of a shift in the industry, where tech giant workers who were considered to have high bargaining power now face recurring cuts and a more cautious market.
Protest organizers said most management doors remained closed, and the petition was ultimately handed to an employee in Pichai’s office. Google did not respond. The employees gave management two weeks to reply.
Source:
www.jpost.com
