Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Google
Nearly 100 Google employees gathered on a grassy stretch of the company's Mountain View campus on Thursday, standing in the shadow of the Googleplex with signs that read "Googlers for Job Security. " They had come with a single message for CEO Sundar Pichai: stop treating layoffs as the easy answer. The demonstration marked the public delivery of a petition signed by more than 4,500 workers, addressed to Pichai and three senior executives. It arrived after a wave of tech-industry cuts that has left even employees who kept their jobs looking over their shoulders—and it landed while Alphabet, Google's parent, sits on a valuation that recently crossed $4 trillion.
What the Google employees actually want
The petition lays out four concrete demands. Workers want guaranteed severance for everyone who gets laid off, pegged to the packages Google offered back in January 2023. They want voluntary exit packages offered before any involuntary cuts. They want the option to take severance as extended paid leave rather than a lump sum—a change aimed squarely at visa holders, who often have just a few months to find new work before their status is at risk. And they want an end to forced-distribution performance ratings. That last point cuts deep. Under Google's GRAD system, only a set percentage of employees can receive top ratings, which means some workers get pushed below the line regardless of how their managers rated them. "There are folks that have been involved in our campaign that had gotten totally fine reviews from their managers, then ended up getting a low rating and were fired out of the blue," said Joshua Carroll, a product manager in Google Cloud and an organizer with the Alphabet Workers Union.
Why the union stopped waiting for CEO Sundar Pichai to listen
The Alphabet Workers Union, which has roughly 1,400 members out of Alphabet's nearly 191,000 employees, launched the campaign more than a year ago. The trigger was familiar: Google's 2023 layoffs, which eliminated around 12,000 jobs and, organizers say, gutted institutional knowledge along the way. Smaller rounds have followed since, less predictable and no less unsettling. Around 20 workers began delivering the petition at 9 a.m., visiting the offices of Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and senior vice presidents Rick Osterloh and Nick Fox before reaching Pichai's office. The executives weren't there, so the group slipped the petition under their doors. "This petition is the largest piece of employee feedback that Google has received about job security," union president Parul Koul told the crowd.
Workers suspect Google's massive AI spend is funding the layoffs
Hanging over all of it is artificial intelligence. Google has pledged massive capital spending on data centers, and employees increasingly suspect that headcount is the line item being trimmed to fund it. Management has also begun folding "AI fluency" into performance metrics without spelling out how it will be measured, which only sharpens the anxiety. The union has already notched a win. Voluntary exit packages have been offered to more than 70,000 Googlers since the campaign began—though Koul notes that figure reflects who was eligible, not who accepted. Pichai has publicly credited employee feedback for the program, saying it gives people agency. Google has not commented on the petition. As cameras rolled Thursday, the workers had a chant ready: "Google, Google, can't you see? We deserve security."