From a global perspective, Germany is an absolute workers’ paradise. Not the one that Marx and Engels imagined and the GDR wanted to realize and failed miserably, but one where trade unions have a proper say in company matters. On the one hand, this leads to the thoroughly intended positive results of generous vacation time and holiday regulations and regulated working hours as well as collectively agreed wages. On the other hand, it can lead to stagnation in companies if their hands are tied by unions and works councils in their responses to changes in industry and the economy.

The U.S. has a great tradition of unions in the manufacturing industries that had a large say in the companies. In some, this led to real excesses, including the auto and longshoremen’s unions, which actually took on criminal characteristics. Unions in the U.S. (and also in Germany), however, have been experiencing a decline in membership in recent decades. Traditionally heavily unionized industries such as mining disappeared, and the transformation of the economy from one dominated by manufacturing industries to one dominated by services and creative occupations is reducing the importance of unions. The failure of unions themselves to understand new and changed old occupations and to make appropriate offers to workers and members is certainly also to blame.

This change can be seen particularly strongly in the USA. Many manufacturing jobs have been outsourced abroad. China, Mexico or India are today’s production sites, while workers without university degrees increasingly end up on the street, find themselves in lower-paid professions or even withdraw from the world of work. The gap between a well-paid elite of highly educated workers and the rest of the population, who often have to make a living on minimum wages, is widening. This gap is particularly evident in Silicon Valley, where annual salaries of $150,000 or $250,000 for employees of Google, Apple and the like are almost considered underpayments.

Then there are the generous fringe benefits that employees of these companies receive, from free food from breakfast to midnight lunch, excellent health care, housing subsidies, bonuses, kindergarten places and so on. Unions don’t exist at these companies. The tech elite don’t need them, one would think.

It may seem all the more astonishing that today, after a year of secret preparation, more than 200 Google employees announced that they had organized themselves into a union. The Alphabet Workers Union for the holding company to which Google or Waymo belong was officially founded. Although they currently have just over 225 members from the 260,000-strong workforce of full-time and temporary workers, it is a first for Silicon Valley.

It was prompted by several uproars in recent years. One was the allegations of sexual harassment that surfaced at many Silicon Valley companies. Google itself experienced a so-called walkout in 2018, when 20,000 employees worldwide walked off the job and took to the streets to demonstrate against the cover-up of sexual harassment and revenge firings of employees who reported it. Further, employees resisted projects with the military or immigration under the Trump presidency, where Google management felt forced to shut down those projects. And in recent weeks, the questionable dismissal of renowned Google AI researcher Timnit Gebru led to protests inside and outside the company.

The reaction of Google’s management to the formation of the union is restrained. They do not want to be deprived of the opportunity to negotiate directly with the employees. The reactions of the Alphabet Group management so far seem to have failed, not least because some of the organizers of past protests and activities have been fired.

Google, which had stated the motto “Don’t be evil” in its official documents when it went public, is increasingly being held accountable by its own employees. Too many things had happened in recent years to make the motto seem hollow. The union formation, organized as a new affiliate under the Communications Workers of America, is also interesting in that it seeks to address shortcomings of previous unions. For example, it also represents contract workers, who after all make up half of all employees. Subcontracted workers are typically the first to be laid off and receive none or fewer of the usual fringe benefits. They represent a kind of precariat among Silicon Valley workers.

For the employees of other tech companies in Silicon Valley and the unions in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, there is a lot to learn. There, too, they have not understood the new tech companies, the service sector or the situation of gig workers and are increasingly becoming guardians of sinecures for their members in old traditional occupational fields. My example here is always that Lufthansa employees, train drivers or pilots unions go on strike more than supermarket employees who have much worse working conditions. And such union behavior – and I say this as someone who comes from a pro-union background – repels the younger generation, who were born into a different world than today’s union representatives. And besides the demand that Alphabet act ethically in the best interest of society and the environment, some of the values of the Alphabet Workers Union sound very different from what has come from unions in the past:

1. All Alphabet workers deserve a voice: full-time employees, temporary employees, contractors, and vendors. We care for and support each other by striving for open and continuous dialogue among union members.
2. Social and economic justice are paramount to achieving just outcomes. We will prioritize the needs of the worst off. Neutrality never helps the victim.
3. Everyone deserves a welcoming environment, free from harassment, bigotry, discrimination, and retaliation regardless of age, caste, class, country of origin, disability, gender race, religion, or sexual orientation.
4. All aspects of our work should be transparent, including the freedom to decline to work on projects that don’t align with our values. We need to know the impact of our work, whether it’s on Alphabet workers, our communities, or the world.
5. Our decisions are made democratically, not just by electing our leaders who set the agenda, but by actively and continuously listening to what workers believe is important.
6. We prioritize society and the environment instead of maximizing profits at all costs. We can make money without doing evil.
7. We stand in solidarity with workers and advocates everywhere, who are fighting to make their workplaces more just and demanding that the tech industry refuse to maintain infrastructures of oppression.

For Google and other Silicon Valley tech companies, it will be quite exciting to see how they have helped a union renaissance. And in typical Silicon Valley style, I expect them to reinvent and transform unions here as well and bring them into the 21st century.

If you want to find out for yourself how unionization might evolve at Alphabet and in Silicon Valley, I recommend my new online course. Based on my book – Foresight Mindset – my AI robot AlphaSophia and I show how to use the Future Mindset to predict the future a bit with methods like Backcasting, 2×2-Matrix, or STEEP. Have a look at the funny preview videos.

This article was also posted in German.