Campaign

Google Help Content Creation Team

The Content Creation Union Crabscot

Who we are

Our bargaining unit includes every North American branch of the content creation project:

  • Help Center & Knowledge Base writers
  • Technical Writers
  • Multimedia graphic & motion designers
  • Quality Assurance (QA)
  • Launch Coordinators
  • Targeted Support

If you've never heard of us, go to support.google.com and scroll through the countless products we create content for. If you’ve ever searched for help with a Google product, you’ve read our writing and seen our graphics.

AWU's first union contract!

In a first for AWU, our team ratified a two-year contract with multinational giant Accenture (December 2024). This contract secures us:

  • 6 weeks of severance pay, so we never have to face layoffs without a safety net again.
  • Guaranteed permanent remote work from home.
  • Nondiscrimination guarantees.
  • A progressive discipline plan, so we won't be fired without just cause.
  • Quarterly meetings with our managers to discuss problems with our tools and working conditions.
  • A promise that we won't have to use keystroke monitoring or mouse tracking software.
  • Even more!

The team has also secured joint employer status with Google from the NLRB, and continues to work to bring them to the table as well.

Collective Bargaining Agreement (Jan 1, 2025–Jan 1, 2027)

Why we unionized

During the 6-year span of our team's existence, we've continually absorbed the workloads responsibilities of official Google employees. Yet, instead of Accenture and Google recognizing us as highly specialized workers worthy of respect, we are treated as resources for Google to exhaust.

Key struggles we've faced:

Despite these struggles, we’ve improved content quality, lowered turnover, and reduced leaks. Our motivation to form a union stemmed from our dedication to our work.

We unionized when we realized that the only positive changes we'd ever seen on our team were achieved by our collective efforts, rather than relying on our passive managers to help us. For example:

  • We recovered over $10,000 in skimmed wages for our affected coworkers.
  • We convinced our company to return involuntarily transferred writers back to our project.
  • We wrote a letter that persuaded Accenture executives to expand our PTO to cover all our mandatory holidays.

In these ways, our team has always been a union. Pursuing a union contract was merely an official way for us to speak with one voice about the needs we’ve expressed for years. 

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Joint-employed by Google & Accenture

The NLRB has repeatedly ruled in favor of our team's claim that we are jointly employed by both Accenture and Google.

"Google possesses and exercises such substantial direct and immediate control over the employees’ benefits, hours of work, supervision, and direction, as to warrant finding that Google meaningfully affects matters relating to the employment relationship with those employees." 
~NLRB ruling from 11/24/2024

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In the press

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