Over 650 Alphabet Workers Sign Petition Demanding Post-Roe Protections
Petition urges Google expand abortion benefits to contract workers, end donations to anti-abortion politicians and PACs, protect user data on abortions from law enforcement access, and stop allowing misleading abortion ads
This week, the Alphabet Workers Union, which has over 1,100 members across multiple Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) subsidiaries, sent a petition to multiple Alphabet executives calling on them to meet worker demands regarding reproductive justice in a post-Roe world.
Get Our Activist Investing Case Study!
Get the entire 10-part series on our in-depth study on activist investing in PDF. Save it to your desktop, read it on your tablet, or print it out to read anywhere! Sign up below!
Q2 2022 hedge fund letters, conferences and more
Alphabet Workers Demand Post-Roe Protections
The petition, which has over 650 signatures from Alphabet workers, was sent to Sundar Pichai and other top Alphabet executives on Monday.
It broadly makes three sets of demands: 1) that all abortion benefits promised by Google to full-time employees (FTEs) be extended to the contracting workforce (TVCs), 2) that Google stop funding politicians through NetPAC, given the role many of those receiving Google donations played in supporting Supreme Court justices who enoverturned Roe, and 3) protecting Google users seeking abortions, by ensuring law enforcement cannot access abortion information and preventing misleading ads that direct users to anti-abortion “pregnancy crisis centers” when searching for abortions.
A full draft of the petition is below. The following executives were sent the petition on Monday:
Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google and Alphabet) Fiona Cicconi (SVP People Operations and Chief People Officer) Bobby Dhanoa (VP Extended Workforce Solutions) Karan Bhatia (VP Government Affairs and Public Policy) Melanie Parker (Chief Diversity Officer and Employee Engagement) Jerry Dischler (Vice President and General Manager of ads at Google)None have yet responded to the petition’s demands. As of Wednesday evening, the petition had been signed by 659 workers across Alphabet.
Following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, Google quickly publicized new benefits for full-time employees, including relocation support for employees seeking to move to states with protected abortion access and health care coverage for any out-of-state abortion procedures.
But these benefits were only promised to full-time employees directly hired by Google, discounting over half of Alphabet’s workforce who misclassified as temporary, vendor and contract workers. TVCs already receive lower pay than FTEs, have fewer benefits, and are more likely to live in states with restricted abortion access. They are particularly vulnerable to the Supreme Court’s decision and would benefit the most from Google’s expanded benefits on abortion access.
The petition calls on Alphabet to extend its reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare standard in the company’s US Wages and Benefits Standards to all workers.
“Google has the money and resources to ensure all their employees, contracted or not, have access to abortion,” said Alejandra Beatty, the Southwest Chapter Lead of AWU and a technical program manager at Verily, an Alphabet company. “They emailed us right after the ruling to affirm their support for their full time employees getting abortions, but did not address how contracted workers, who tend to have more marginalized identities, would be supported in trying to exercise their right to choose. Google can and should do better.”
Another demand is for Google to protect our government from corporate influence. The petition calls for Alphabet to stop lobbying politicians and any political organizations through NetPAC or any other means, as many of these politicians were responsible for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.
“Google says they support abortive access for all people but that means very little when they are bankrolling politicians who continue to infringe on human rights issues not only concerning abortion, but voting access and gun control as well,” said Emrys Adair, retail associate at a Google contractor and member of AWU. “If Google is truly dedicated to supporting abortion access, they will put their money where their mouth is and withdrawal their funds from those who seek to make anti-abortion legislation.”
The last demand in the petition calls for Google to protect users and customers from having their data used against them and addressing the misleading information as it pertains to abortion services and other reproductive healthcare services on all Alphabet platforms and product. Google must ensure that users searching for abortion access are protected from having this access given to law enforcement, and are able to to access clinics with real abortion providers—not the “pregnancy crisis centers” that have run misleading ads on Google targeting those seeking abortions.
“Recently I read about Facebook handing over information that was used to arrest a user seeking abortion access and it became clear that tech companies are not going far enough to protect workers and users in a post-Roe America,” said Bambi Okugawa, a data center technician at Google and member of AWU. “If tech companies, be it Facebook, Google, or Bing, truly want to be an ally to those looking to get an abortion, they need to refuse to share users information regarding abortion searches and do their due diligence to make sure false information that could make users unsafe isn’t circulating the site.”
The Alphabet Workers Union is dedicated to continuing to fight for abortion rights to make sure workers and users alike are protected. History has proven that abortions will happen whether they are legal or not, so workers are organizing to make sure everyone has the tools necessary to access abortions as safely as possible, and we urge Google to do the same.
Protect Our Worker's Rights
We, the undersigned, recognize that all Alphabet workers, of all genders, are impacted by the overturning of Roe v. Wade and are disappointed in Alphabet’s response and influence on this ruling.
Alphabet has continued to make access to reproductive and gender affirming healthcare a “women’s issue” by only providing women@ Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) with listening sessions, and using gendered language in their communication with workers when this is an issue that affects all of us.
In order to align with Google’s core values, we demand that Alphabet acknowledges the impact this Supreme Court ruling has on all its workers and to immediately do the following:
Protect all workers’ access to reproductive healthcare by setting a reproductive healthcare standard in the US Wages and Benefits Standards including: Extending the same travel-for-healthcare benefits offered to FTEs to TVCs. Adding a minimum of 7 days of additional sick time because workers will need to travel for significant periods to obtain health services. Increasing FTE & TVC reimbursement amounts for travel to $150 per night. $50 is NOT a viable reimbursement for a hotel stay in most states, and does not address childcare or lost wages. Publishing a TVC transparency report, detailing vendors’ compliance to the Alphabet/Google US Wages and Benefits Standards. For example, details on why certain roles are exempt, and timelines for vendors to come into compliance. Protect our government from corporate influence. Alphabet must stop lobbying politicians and any political organizations, through NetPAC or any other means because these politicians were responsible for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and continue to infringe on other human rights issues related to voting access and gun control. Protect our users and customers from having their data used against them and addressing the disinformation and misleading information as it pertains to abortion services and other reproductive healthcare services on all Alphabet platforms and products by: Instituting immediate user data privacy controls for all health-related activity, for example, searching for reproductive justice, gender-affirming care, and abortion access information on Google must never be saved, handed over to law enforcement, or treated as a crime. Fixing misleading search results related to abortion services by removing results for fake abortion providers. No longer working with publishers of disinformation related to abortion services who violate AdSense's publishers policies related to unreliable and harmful claims about a major health crisis. Providing transparency into ad revenue sharing with Google custom search so that abortion services that pay for Google ads don’t inadvertently have their ad revenue go to organizations that are actively working against them.In order to meet these demands, we call on Alphabet to create a dedicated task-force with 50% employee representation, responsible for implementing changes across all products and our company, just like Alphabet did for handling the COVID-19 pandemic.
About Alphabet Workers Union
Alphabet Workers Union - CWA unites full-time employees, temporary employees, vendors, and contractors at Google and other Alphabet companies in the United States and Canada in collective action to ensure that our workplace is equitable and that Alphabet acts ethically.
Updated on Aug 18, 2022, 2:32 pm
Source valuewalk