‘Locked out of the entire system,’ workers react after Google announces layoffs; Pichai says process was ‘far from random’

The Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), said that executives were focusing on the economic reality for the company “and not the human reality of the fired workers.”

Following the announcement that Google will be laying off 12,000 workers (about 6% of its workforce), workers shared their experience after being locked out of their systems, and with work at the company stalled after the massive job cut.

Joining a growing list of tech company to trim staff as the economic boom that the industry rode during the COVID-19 pandemic ebbs, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the parent company of Google, in an email had informed staff on January 20 about the cuts.

Also read | Left jobless, thousands of Indian IT workers scramble for options to stay in the U.S.

Calling them a reflection of the “rigorous review" carried out by Google of its operations., Mr. Pichai said he was “deeply sorry” for the layoffs. “Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,” Mr. Pichai wrote. “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”

Reacting to the same, the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), said that executives were focusing on the economic reality for the company “and not the human reality of the fired workers.”

The AWU was started in 2021 with 226 employees signing union cards with the Communications Workers of America in the United States. Currently, the AWU claims membership of over 1,100 workers.

In a Twitter post, an account stated to be of the AWU cited the experiences of laid-off workers as well as the reaction of workers whose colleagues have been laid off. “Thousands of our colleagues were stripped of their livelihoods—without even being given the chance to say goodbye to their teammates,” it said adding that these workers will now be forced to look for jobs alongside 2,00,000 other tech workers that have been laid off over the past 14 months.