KATE THOMPSON DAVY: When Googling Google throws up a rebellion, one that is going global to boot
Staff want to change the world again with union, by taking the tech giant back to its ethical roots
If an angry mob of Donald Trump supporters hadn’t stormed the US Capitol building on January 6 the biggest story that week might just have been this: a collective of Google staff announced the formation of a new labour union following the controversial dismissal of prominent artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Timnit Gebru.
Then this week international Google employees joined forces with their US and Canadian counterparts. The union alliance represents workers from Google itself and parent company Alphabet. On Monday Reuters reported that the UNI Global Union, which represents about 20-million workers around the world, said it had helped form the group (called Alpha Global), which represents staff from the UK, Sweden and Germany, among others, and will include full-time, temporary and contract workers...
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