Dozens of dissatisfied Google employees protested outside corporate facilities in New York and California this week to protest recent layoffs and low contractor pay.
Bloomberg reported that perhaps fifty Google employees joined in a demonstration on Thursday outside a company store located near the firm’s headquarters in Manhattan.
Wednesday’s separate demonstration outside Google’s corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California, centered on substandard subcontractor working conditions.
The protests took place days after Google laid off over 12,000 employees, or 6% of its total workforce, in the greatest round of layoffs in the company’s history.
The protests coincided with the release of Alphabet’s fourth-quarter earnings, which showed a profit of $13.62 billion on revenue of $76.05 billion. These figures fell short of Wall Street’s projections, but protestors used them as evidence that layoffs were needless.
“Google has debunked its own justification for laying off 12,000 of our coworkers today,” said software engineer and union member Alberta Devor in a statement. Our coworkers were not required to lose their livelihoods.
Bloomberg reports that the workers are forced to “poverty wages and no benefits” while performing jobs related to Google’s AI capabilities and content filtering. Alphabet Workers Union, a group with over 1,200 workers that comprises both full-time employees and contractors, organized both events.
“It is evident that the company’s meager savings from layoffs pale in comparison to the billions spent on stock buybacks and the billions earned in profit last quarter,” Devor continued.
Google has been criticized for its handling of the layoffs, with some affected employees learning of their termination via early-morning emails or news articles.
Numerous laid-off employees have vented their ire in interviews and nasty social media posts. One former employee stated that she was terminated while on a mental health leave, while another stated that he learned of his termination at 2:00 a.m. while breastfeeding his young daughter.
The Google layoffs affected firm veterans and top achievers, with one ex-employee declaring that tech companies view employees as “100% disposable.”
Alphabet’s chief executive officer, Sundar Pichai, justified the cost-cutting initiative as vital to prepare the company for poor market conditions. Google joined a number of other major companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, in cutting employees amid the recent tech sector collapse.
Google has been contacted by The Post for comment.
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