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Alan McAvinney, software engineer at Google and organizing chair of the Alphabet Workers Union, said she felt it was important to organize and protest as workers in an industry whose figureheads have aligned themselves with Trump. “Particularly as workers at Google, it’s been really eye-opening to see our bosses line up from day one behind the administration this time around,” McAvinney said.

Tech workers turned out in force for May Day, building on last year's first-ever tech contingent with a bigger, louder bloc. Members of Tech Workers Coalition (TWC), Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), United Videogame Workers, and No Tech for Apartheid marched alongside SEIU, airline workers, and other unions to put workers over billionaires.

“We don’t want Alphabet to be in the business of war,” said Alec McGinnis, a Google employee who is a member of the Alphabet Workers Union. “As workers, we should know how these things are being used and should be able to feel good about working on ethical products.”

In the open letter posted Friday, workers with groups including Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, the Alphabet Workers Union, No Tech for Apartheid and No Azure for Apartheid sought to connect Anthropic’s stand to employee efforts to get their companies to disclose more about the services they sell to state agencies taking part in President Donald Trump’s deportation push.

The Alphabet Workers Union, which represents roughly 1,400 North American employees, said in a statement on Wednesday that it stands in solidarity with immigrant communities and working people “standing up to ICE terror across the country.”

Meghan Day, a Google software engineer who was recently elected treasurer of the Alphabet Workers Union, said workers were demoralized by layoffs at the company in 2023 and 2024 and frequently raised concerns about job security when the group later held employee forums. This year, more than 2,000 employees signed a petition calling for better severance packages and demanding that the company exhaust voluntary buyouts before turning to layoffs.

The Alphabet Workers Union applauded the move as evidence that organizing efforts are influencing corporate policy. “The sustained organizing of Googlers for Job Security over the past year has made it possible for nearly 70,000 Googlers to be granted the option to take a voluntary exit package instead of hundreds of layoffs,” Maria DiPasquale, the union’s communications coordinator, said in a statement.

The Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), which represents employees of Google and its parent company, released a statement in reaction to Amazon’s recent workforce reduction.

For a generative artificial intelligence system to learn how to write an autopsy report, human workers must sort and annotate thousands of crime scene images. The precarious work of training AI, which generally pays just a few dollars, has sparked a movement for better wages and conditions stretching from Kenya to Colombia.