The Leader of the Alphabet Workers Union Looks Beyond Wages

Parul Koul, a software engineer at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, is the executive chair of the recently formed Alphabet Workers Union, which isn’t recognized by the company but counts about 750 employees and contract workers as members. Koul, based in New York City, discusses with Bloomberg Businessweek her union’s plans to tackle what she sees as Google’s complicity in spreading disinformation, exacerbating climate change, and automating away jobs.

We’ve seen the cost that activism has had on employees, like the firing of organizers, that has made things very difficult to sustain. The structure of a union and pooling our resources together to build an organization for workers will hopefully be able to sustain that fight for the long term.