The tech giant that pushed its employees to work from home in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic is now asking many of them to return to the office for at least three days a week. That’s a significant shift in company policy; some workers say they don’t want to return.
“Overnight, workers’ professionalism has been disregarded in favor of ambiguous attendance tracking practices tied to our performance evaluations,” Chris Schmidt, a Google software engineer, said Thursday in a statement released by the Alphabet Workers Union, representing some contract and direct employees at Google. He argued that the new rules ignore that some workers have family, health, and other commitments outside of work.
Google still needs to set a firm return date. Still, it did announce on Wednesday that it would consider staffers’ onsite work a factor in their performance reviews and that teams will begin sending reminders to people who are frequently absent. The company will continue to consider remote work requests in exceptional circumstances, like the air quality warnings in effect for parts of Canada and the US this week due to wildfire smoke, CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a note to employees.
He added that the company expects most employees to return to the office by October. He said those who cannot make it to the office will have their wages adjusted. Google has more than 144,000 full-time, salaried employees worldwide. But it also has thousands of temporary, contract, and other part-time workers and tens of thousands of contractors who work on Google projects for companies such as Cognizant.
The company has a long history of worker activism and protests. Last year, employees walked out of campuses globally over sexual harassment policies and the alleged mishandling of abuse complaints. And in 2021, employees filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to form a minority union at the company.
Minority unions have been a powerful force for workplace change for over a century, and they can help clarify divisions in even the most collaborative workplaces. A Google union could signal that the company is willing to listen to its workers and find ways for everyone to stay at work while still being safe and healthy. But a Google union is different from a traditional one and will have a different path to success than most other union drives. It will forge a relationship with the NLRB as a non-traditional employer-employee joint committee rather than seek a vote by all employees. That process may take years. The NLRB will be watching closely. If the effort goes ahead, it will test the NLRB’s ability to protect non-traditional unions. It will also show whether unions of a small number of workers can successfully push for changes at large employers.
