Noah Berger/AP Photo
Workers protested Google’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations at the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters in November 2018.
Don’t let this get around, but professionals are forming unions like crazy these days.
In just the past couple of years, journalists at new and old media outlets, graduate student teaching and research assistants at public and private universities, employees of nonprofit foundations and nonprofit recipients of foundations, and the workers who make the tech world go round have all opted to unionize. Just yesterday, a union unveiled itself at Google, adopting the form of a semi-union in a clear effort to keep Google from crushing it.
To that end, the new Google union isn’t seeking collective-bargaining rights, which, under the whittled-down National Labor Relations Act, would effectively enable Google management to do just about anything to threaten and harass its members. By not submitting itself to the jurisdiction of the stunted law governing employment relationships, the new union can exercise its First Amendment rights to raise a host of issues—including Google’s impact on the wider world and its coddling of executives who’ve sexually harassed employees—in ways that what passes for labor law here might restrain.
Google is certainly ripe for such worker uprisings. In 2018, some 20,000 Google employees walked off the job to protest the tens of millions of dollars Google had paid to two executives who’d resigned when the charges of sexual harassment were lodged against them. Employees have also protested the company’s providing its technology to Trump’s border guards.
Google will still surely seek to undermine its new union, even though it isn’t seeking the company’s recognition or bargaining rights; such worker-rights phobia seems to be the knee-jerk reaction of Big Tech’s owners generally. Right now, Amazon is campaigning against the efforts of its employees in a Birmingham, Alabama, warehouse to win bargaining rights, notwithstanding the fact that Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, whose current estimated wealth is roughly $180 billion, could personally buy the entire state of Alabama if he so desired.
By a number of metrics, American workers’ desire to unionize has seldom been higher. The most recent Gallup poll on the subject shows that 65 percent of Americans have a favorable view of unions, the highest level in many decades. The immovable object that counters what is not yet an irresistible force is the pathological hatred of unions by the nation’s CEOs, who exploit the deficiencies in our labor laws to threaten their workers’ livelihoods if they want to organize and bargain. When a workforce consists of hard-to-replace professionals, however, the balance of power may shift to the workers: hence the recent wave of unionization among professionals. (This is also why professional athletes and airline pilots have long had some of the strongest unions around.) The growing militance and strategic smarts of American workers is a hugely welcome development; at some point, though, those qualities need to be augmented by sufficient political clout to change our labor laws so that workers can finally receive what’s due them for their work.
