The Alphabet Workers Union escalated its "Googlers for Job Security" campaign on Thursday, sending around 20 workers to slip a petition under the doors of four senior executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, after finding none of them available to receive it in person.
By noon, close to 100 employees had filled a grassy area of the Mountain View campus, carrying union placards and unfurling a white banner printed with the names of petition signatories. The petition, first written in early 2025, asks Google to guarantee severance for every laid-off worker, make voluntary exit packages a formal standing policy, end performance quotas, and allow severance to be taken as extended paid leave.
The workers also visited the offices of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and senior vice presidents Rick Osterloh and Nick Fox before proceeding to Pichai's office. None of the executives were present.
Parul Koul, a Google software engineer and president of the Alphabet Workers Union told those gathered that the demands were straightforward: voluntary exits before layoffs, guaranteed severance standards, and an end to performance quotas. The union said it tried to deliver the petition to Pichai last year and, after receiving no substantive response, continued collecting signatures and returned with more than twice as many names.
The protest reflects broader anxiety across the tech sector. Since 2022, companies including Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft have cut tens of thousands of jobs, often in repeated rounds. Google laid off 12,000 employees in 2023 and has since conducted several smaller rounds affecting thousands more. Google's workforce, historically vocal on ethics and corporate policy, is now organising around something more immediate: basic employment security in an era of rolling cuts, tighter performance systems, and uncertainty over how AI will reshape roles.
At the rally, Google software engineer Nobel Barakat described colleagues working longer hours out of fear of poor performance ratings. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For working professionals across the industry, the action signals that job security, once taken for granted at top-tier tech employers, has become a live organising issue, with workers increasingly willing to push back publicly on the terms of their employment.
