Google says it has met the workers’ contract deadlines, and the workers paint a much bleaker picture.

Jack Benedict spoke at the Austin City Council meeting about how the support of the city and the union would motivate them to continue their fight, but then his colleague Katie Marie Marschner came to the podium, pulled herself together and said she didn’t want to interrupt anyone, but suddenly everyone was fired. In a video uploaded to the union’s Twitter page, Marschner added that she had received a message from her colleague informing her that YouTube Music contract workers had been fired during the weekly membership meeting.

The board was supposed to discuss and pass a resolution calling on Google to negotiate with the contractors’ group, but Google says they should instead negotiate with their “employer,” Cognizant. Cognizant is a Google partner and part of the Google Cloud Business Group. This is despite a January ruling by the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Google had refused to bargain with the workers. This is illegal. The contract workers formally voted to join Alphabet’s union last April. This group, which previously consisted of nearly half a hundred workers, cited minimum benefits and low wages, as well as a back-to-work order, as reasons for both joining the union and striking in February. Their statement said many were forced to work multiple jobs to make ends meet…

this is the exact moment our coworkers found out we had been laid off while speaking in front of city council pic.twitter.com/IcsCszGe3Z

— jacob (@peepaw_) March 1, 2024

One of our members who was just laid off from the @Youtube Music team, Katie Marie Marschner, shares the story of everything that happened before and after the moment she walked up to the dias to tell the City Council that @Google had just fired her whole team.

Part 1: pic.twitter.com/apq9XBbdoe

— Alphabet Workers Union (AWU-CWA) (@AlphabetWorkers) March 2, 2024

“Workers began an unfair labor practice strike on February 3, 2023, in response to a retaliatory back-to-work order … Workers joined the strike because their only other option was ‘voluntary resignation’ because they could not physically show up at the office. Many workers either live across state lines or are not paid enough to afford the expenses associated with in-person work, such as gas and child care. While dozens of local workers returned to work, several out-of-state workers remained on strike,” the statement said.

In its response, Google defends itself by claiming that it fired the employees at the end of their contracts, and adds that they are not Google employees, but work for Cognizant. Only the Washington Post reports that the scenario was not natural: “Sam Regan, a contractor data analyst for YouTube Music, was in the office when the layoffs occurred. The mood was suspicious, he said, as security guards attended a brief morning meeting where company leaders ‘coldly’ informed workers that their project was being cut. Workers had about 20 minutes to gather their belongings and leave the premises before they were considered “trespassing.

In the video that surfaced on TikTok, Marschner confirmed that it came from the office, but still considers the layoffs unexpected: “In that meeting, [they] watched the wifi get cut, watched their access to Gmail get cut. In my team, we were working on our most important workflow (I work on the charts team) … it’s like the most important forward-looking team in our whole department. The layers of subcontracting are a mechanism by which Google shirks its responsibility to its employees … The NLRB found that Google has control over the employees and their working conditions and is therefore obligated to bargain directly with their union”.

It’s pathetic what Google has done.

Source: PCGamer