Alphabet Workers Union – CWA Local 9009

The Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) – CWA Local 9009 is a minority union of workers at Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiaries, founded on 4 January 2021, as a formal institutional vehicle for the company's longstanding tradition of internal employee activism. Affiliated with the Communications Workers of America under its CODE-CWA (Campaign to Organize Digital Employees) program, AWU is deliberately open to all Alphabet workers regardless of employment type — full-time staff, temps, vendors, and contractors (TVCs) — distinguishing itself from traditional majority unions that organize only permanent employees in a single bargaining unit. Operating outside the National Labor Relations Board framework, it does not hold collective-bargaining authority over the company's product decisions, but it organizes through direct action, public statements, solidarity campaigns, and individual-worker support across the United States and Canada.

Founding and structure

AWU was announced publicly on 4 January 2021, following more than a year of secret organizing by a cross-functional group of Alphabet employees. At the public launch, 226 workers had signed union cards; the membership grew to over 400 by end of the founding day, and to approximately 700 within the first week. Co-executive chairs Parul Koul and Chewy Shaw, both software engineers, announced the union in a New York Times op-ed, writing that Alphabet workers had long had "workplace concerns dismissed by executives" and that the company "has a responsibility to prioritize the public good."

The pre-majority union model — also called a "solidarity union" — makes AWU structurally different from a traditionally certified union. Membership is dues-paying and voluntary; organizers, stewards, and an executive board are elected; and campaigns are conducted through direct action and public pressure rather than collective-bargaining agreements. The explicit long-term goal is majority recognition, but the union can act on behalf of workers and conduct public campaigns without it. Critically, the wall-to-wall membership model — open to TVCs as well as full-time Googlers — means AWU covers a workforce that NLRB-framework organizing would require multiple separate bargaining units to reach.

Origins in Alphabet worker activism

AWU was built on a decade of internal Alphabet worker campaigns that preceded its founding. The Project Maven petition of April 2018, signed by more than 3,100 Alphabet employees demanding that Google not renew its US Department of Defense AI-drone-imagery contract, is the movement's founding document; Google declined to renew the contract by June 2018. In the same year, a campaign against Project Dragonfly — a censored Chinese search engine Google was developing internally — contributed to that project's cancellation. The November 2018 international walkout by approximately 20,000 workers across 50 offices over the company's handling of sexual harassment marked the most visible collective action at a US tech company on the public record to that point. AWU codified this tradition into a formal organizational structure with dues, elected leadership, and CWA affiliation, providing continuity across what had previously been episodic campaigns.

AI ethics and Project Nimbus

AWU has consistently positioned itself as an organizational home for Alphabet workers with concerns about how the company's AI work is deployed. The union's campaigns extend the pre-Maven tradition into the generative-AI era.

In April 2024, AWU members participated in the No Tech for Apartheid "Day of Action" sit-in protests at Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale, and Seattle, targeting Alphabet's and Amazon's joint $1.2 billion Project Nimbus cloud contract with the Israeli government and military. On 16 April, nine workers were arrested and removed from company premises. In the days following, approximately two dozen were terminated; total firings ultimately exceeded fifty. AWU condemned the dismissals, writing that the union was "disappointed that Google has not seriously engaged with the concerns of thousands of their employees" and characterizing the terminations as retaliation against workers exercising free speech rights. The April 2024 firings marked a sharp escalation from the management posture workers encountered in the Maven campaign — moving from a "ethics is complicated" register to open retaliation — and are now the clearest documented test of the limits of the tech-worker-refusal strategy inside a frontier lab under a tightened labor market.

Organizing achievements and first contract

AWU has built organizational infrastructure through individual-worker cases and formal recognition efforts. In February 2021, AWU pressure secured the reinstatement of Shannon Wait, a data center worker employed via Adecco as a contractor who had been suspended after pro-union activity — an early demonstration that the wall-to-wall model could provide effective support to TVC workers who have no NLRB recourse.

The union's most significant institutional victory is the first collective bargaining agreement ratified by the Google Help team — workers providing live customer-facing support employed by Alphabet via Accenture — securing work-from-home rights, six weeks' severance, progressive discipline procedures, and nondiscrimination guarantees. A separate YouTube Music Content Operations bargaining unit voted 41-0 to unionize. AWU has also filed NLRB unfair-labor-practice charges against Google over data center organizing and secured NLRB rulings that Google violated the National Labor Relations Act by refusing to bargain with AWU during a vendor contract negotiation.

Current campaigns and membership

As of 2026, AWU's primary campaigns include Googlers for Job Security — a petition effort with over 3,800 signatures opposing performance-rating frameworks used to generate layoffs — and the organizing of AI raters working through the GlobalLogic subcontractor, who form part of the RLHF pipeline for Alphabet's frontier AI products. The union also runs a TVC pay equity campaign seeking back compensation for knowingly underpaid temps, vendors, and contractors. Membership stands at approximately 1,400 dues-paying members within a North American Alphabet workforce of roughly 150,000.