Google workers rally at Mountain View HQ, demanding a floor under their jobs

Just after 9am on Thursday, roughly 100 Google workers gathered outside the company’s Mountain View headquarters, placards in hand, to press a demand that would once have sounded quaint: let us keep our jobs.

The rally, organised by the Alphabet Workers Union, ended with the delivery of a petition signed by more than 4,500 staff to chief executive Sundar Pichai and three senior leaders.

The union, which operates as CWA Local 9009, has spent roughly 18 months building its Googlers for Job Security campaign, undeterred by earlier claims that the company built a surveillance tool to monitor unionising staff.

It is not the only workforce pushing back, with Meta employees having staged their own protest over mouse-tracking before that company’s latest round of cuts.

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The union’s four demands are unusually specific. Workers want guaranteed severance for anyone laid off, set no lower than the packages Google paid in January 2023, and voluntary exit packages offered before any involuntary cuts.

They also want the company to drop its forced-distribution performance ratings, known internally as GRAD quotas, which grade staff against a fixed curve rather than on merit alone. A fourth ask would let workers on visas take their severance as extended paid leave, buying time to find a new sponsor before their immigration status lapses.

None of this appeared overnight. The campaign launched inside the company in January 2025 with 400-odd signatures, hit 2,000 by a petition delivery that April, and staged a Valentine’s Day of Action across 10 offices earlier this year.

The backdrop is three years of contraction. Google cut about 12,000 jobs in early 2023, roughly 6 per cent of its workforce, and has trimmed teams in smaller waves ever since, part of an industry that has shed tens of thousands of roles since 2022.

Much of the current unease is about how AI will reshape the work itself, rather than any single announced cut.

That anxiety has spilled well beyond one campus, with courts in China recently ruling that AI replacement is not lawful grounds for dismissal, a question Western labour law has barely begun to test.

Meta’s most recent round, which the union puts at around 8,000 jobs, helped galvanise the effort. The AWU-CWA executive board had already urged tech staff to organise, arguing that the products “generating massive profits” do not exist without their labour.

Parul Koul, a Google engineer and the union’s president, addressed the crowd on the manicured lawns of the Googleplex. She framed the rally as a fight over conditions as much as headcount, and cast the campaign as a long game rather than a one-off protest.

The pitch to colleagues is less about resisting AI outright than about who absorbs its costs. A guaranteed floor under severance, the argument runs, is what lets people take creative risks when the ground beneath their roles keeps shifting.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and none of the four executives named on the petition appeared to receive it in person.

The company has, however, extended voluntary exit packages to more than 70,000 staff across several divisions since the campaign began, a move that makes it something of an outlier among the big platforms and that the union counts as partial vindication for keeping the pressure on.

Whether Thursday shifts policy is another matter, as the industry pours billions into automation while funding worker retraining almost as an afterthought.

More than 1,000 Googlers have joined visibility actions since the launch, and hundreds have sent in photographs explaining why they signed.

For now the numbers sit on Pichai’s desk, and the union is betting that 4,500 signatures are harder to ignore than a single walkout.

“We are demanding that Google workers have the conditions and the security to do their best work,” Koul said, “where they can actually bring new ideas and innovations to life instead of working in an environment driven by fear.”