More than 100 Google $GOOGL employees gathered outside the company's Mountain View, California headquarters on Thursday, calling for stronger job protections and delivering a petition signed by more than 4,500 workers to top executives.
The rally, organized by the Alphabet Workers Union, drew employees from across the country. Workers carried signs and chanted at the Googleplex around midday. The union counts about 1,400 members, while Alphabet, Google's parent company, has a global workforce of nearly 191,000.
Around 20 workers began delivering the petition at 9 a.m., visiting the offices of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and senior vice presidents Rick Osterloh and Nick Fox. None of the three executives were present, and employees slid copies of the petition under their doors, according to Business Insider. At Pichai's office, a member of his team told the workers the petition would be passed along to the CEO.
Among the petition's core demands: a severance guarantee for any worker who is laid off, the option of voluntary departures ahead of any mandatory cuts, the elimination of forced-distribution performance ratings, and the ability for employees to take their severance in the form of extended paid leave. The union first circulated the petition in early 2025, attempted to deliver it to CEO Sundar Pichai at that time, and received no substantive response.
"We are demanding that Google workers have the conditions and the security to do their best work, where they can actually bring new ideas and innovations to life instead of working in an environment driven by fear, where you might be pit against your colleagues or every day you're not sure how much longer you will have this job," Parul Koul, a Google software engineer and president of the Alphabet Workers Union, told ABC7.
Google software engineer Nobel Barakat spoke to the toll the layoff environment has taken on colleagues. "I see worried people, grateful to still have a job, do the best they can to keep it," Barakat told Business Insider. "I've seen people work longer and longer days with the hopes that they avoid a sudden poor performance rating."
The protest reflects wider anxiety across the tech industry. Google's 2023 reduction of 12,000 positions was followed by additional smaller cuts, and other major players — Meta $META, Amazon $AMZN, and Microsoft $MSFT — have together eliminated tens of thousands of roles since 2022.
According to the union, Google has made voluntary exit offers available to more than 70,000 workers in multiple rounds since the campaign launched — though that number counts workers who were eligible, not those who actually took the offer. Google did not comment.