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Employees stand outside the Google offices after walking out as part of a global protest over workplace issues in London, England, on November 1, 2018.
Toby Melville | Reuters
A group of Google contractors, some of whom worked on Search and Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot Bard, have successfully voted to unionize.
The group, from Google contractor Accenture, filed to unionize in June after claiming Google asked them to help train the generative AI responses offered in Search and Bard, and that they misrepresented felt prepared for their work. According to Bloomberg reports, the duties include dealing with “obscene and explicit” content.
After filing a union petition, the group, which included 120 writers, graphic designers and coordinators, was told that more than half of the team would be laid off, according to the Alphabet Workers Union, which claimed the layoffs were an act were of retaliation. .
The Alphabet Workers Union partnered with the Communications Workers of America as a minority union in 2021.
In June, the AWU-CA asked the US National Labor Relations Board to recognize Alphabet as a “joint employer” for its contractor Accenture, meaning the search giant would be held liable for its treatment of employees. As part of this week’s ruling, the regional director of Region 20 – San Francisco determined that the two organizations are joint employers and that both have a duty to negotiate terms of employment, an NLRB spokesperson said.
Employees in the group voted in favor of union representation 26-2 on Monday night, the NLRB confirmed.
Google said it believes the NLRB’s decision to classify it as a joint employer with Accenture is incorrect and has filed an appeal to reverse the decision.
“We have no objection to these Accenture employees choosing to form a union,” Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini said in a statement to CNBC. “We have had many contracts with unionized suppliers for a long time. However, as we have made clear in our active appeal to the NLRB, we are not a joint employer because we simply have no control over their terms of employment or working conditions – this issue lies between the employees and their employer, Accenture.”
Jen Hill, a designer at Google’s Google Help support staff and a member of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA, called it a victory and said the group looks forward to meeting Google at the bargaining table.
“Today’s victory proves what is possible: When workers stand together, not even Google can stand in our way,” Hill said in a statement. “We organized ourselves in such a way that we could have a say in our working conditions. In response, Google has attempted to avoid its responsibility to us as an employer, while also firing dozens of our team members. It is unfair that our jobs are being shipped to workers who will be paid even less than us and have access to even less labor protections.”
The decision marks the second ruling to classify Google as a joint employer with its contractor for a subset of employees. In April, the NLRB announced that it had identified members of the YouTube Content Operations Team to join both Google and Cognizant Technology Solutions. Alphabet also appealed the NLRB’s ruling in that case.
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