Overview
- About 100 employees rallied at Google’s Mountain View campus and delivered a petition to CEO Sundar Pichai and other executives, slipping the document under office doors on Thursday after leaders were not present.
- The petition lists four concrete demands: guaranteed severance for every laid-off worker pegged to the company’s January 2023 packages, voluntary exit offers before mandatory cuts, an end to forced-distribution performance ratings known as GRAD, and the option to take severance as extended paid leave.
- The Alphabet Workers Union led the action; the union has roughly 1,400 members while the petition carries more than 4,500 signatures and organizers say voluntary-exit programs were offered to over 70,000 eligible employees during the campaign.
- Workers tie recent and past cuts to Google’s large AI spending and say management is adding 'AI fluency' to performance expectations, and Google has not issued a substantive public response beyond a staff member agreeing to pass along the petition.
- The move shines a spotlight on the human stakes of tech restructuring by highlighting visa and health‑coverage risks for laid-off workers and adds pressure to ongoing industry and policy debates over how companies should manage AI-driven job changes.