OUR PLATFORM

Just a few years ago, AWU was little more than 25 people in a room with a shared idea. Today, we have over a hundred active organizers and over a thousand members across the US and Canada, and we've reached thousands of Googlers through our campaigns.

We've built active organizing committees and chapters, won significant victories through nationwide campaigns, and our FTE membership is the highest it's ever been.

We're proud of what we've achieved, but the union isn't yet the factor in Google's decision making that it needs to be. We need to use this foundation to massively grow our union to meet the scale of our workplace and the crisis facing the tech industry.

Most Google workers don't know about the union or have never been asked to join. That's the gap we need to fill. Many Googlers agree with our vision, they just haven't been asked yet. That means being much more visible and aggressively expanding our outreach.

Growing to many thousands of members would be a turning point, dramatically expanding our reach, visibility and resources and opening up opportunities beyond what we can imagine today.

The political moment makes this more urgent and more possible than ever. We believe that in the next 3 years we can and must grow by thousands of members. This is a BOLD vision, but only a bold vision can meet this moment.

How we'll get there:

• Put AWU in front of every Googler worker by expanding our outreach across every office, org and team.

• Invest in our capacity by growing our staff team and expanding our comms so more Googlers hear from the union.

• Grow our existing chapters and organizing committees and build new ones in offices and orgs where we don't have them yet. Support them in building the infrastructure to grow, through regular meetings, organizer training, campaign actions and social events, so that every member has a place to plug in.

• Make it easy for members to get involved and grow as leaders, with member action team pipelines, more training opportunities, more in-person training and leadership development opportunities, and simple, clear processes for taking action and becoming an organizer.

Our immigrant rights, labor rights, and civil rights are all under attack. Funding for healthcare, education, science and research, and more is on the chopping block while more money goes to war and militarism.

Tech billionaires are reshaping our world and our future, and Google executives have made it clear who they support. The same people eroding our job security are backing the politicians who carry out this right-wing agenda.

We want to build a powerful union that fights for more than a say in our workplace, one that channels our collective voice and power as tech workers toward shaping the world we want.

We are building our union as part of a nationwide movement that can challenge the power tech companies and tech billionaires hold over society, and bring worker voices into the decisions that shape our society and economy.

We've done this before. The Cambridge chapter ran a petition campaign to save the job of an H-1B coworker. The New York City chapter sprang into action on 48 hours' notice after Trump announced a $100,000 fee on H-1B visas. Our entire national job security campaign pivoted to add a new demand focused on immigrant coworkers.

We've taken strong public positions against ICE violence and the use of AI for war and militarism. These issues matter to our coworkers, and our union has shown it can respond quickly and dramatically. Over the next three years, we will expand this work and back it with more powerful action.

Whether you love working with AI or not, workers have no say in how it's used in our workplace. If it changes our workloads, the expectations placed on us, or the quality of work we're able to do, we deserve a real say in those decisions.

AI's impact reaches far beyond the workplace. It is transforming the environment, education, how people find information, and more, and Google leaders have abandoned their own commitments against military and surveillance uses. Googlers build this technology and bring it into products. We need to be the voice of reason and fight for what's best for our users and for ourselves.

Executives are making massive financial bets on AI. If those bets fail, workers should not pay the price.

The union's AI forums are a start. We want to bring them to many more coworkers, including through international collaboration. Googlers hold a wide range of views on AI. The goal is to engage all of them and build a union with the power to shape how this technology is implemented.

Four years of layoffs, hiring freezes, and restructures have reset what a job in this industry means. The 2023 layoffs are what brought many of our members into the union.

For nearly two years, our national job security campaign has been a cornerstone of AWU's work. More than 5,000 Google workers have signed our petition, many have joined campaign actions like this July's petition delivery, and many have gone on to join the union and become organizers themselves. The campaign has won VEPs and driven our organizing across the union.

Reports from Tufts, MIT, and Anthropic all point in the same direction: software engineering is one of the occupations most exposed to AI. The fight for job security will only become more urgent over the next three years.

Over the next three years, we will build on this momentum by organizing to make VEPs policy, ending GRAD quotas, winning severance as leave, and fighting to end unnecessary layoffs entirely.