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On Friday, a YouTube Music contractor named Jack Benedict took the podium before Austin’s City Council. He was there to urge the council members to encourage Google to negotiate with the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Local 9009. Instead, mid-testimony, he learned that he and 42 of his colleagues had been laid off. The jaw-dropping moment, captured on a livestream, has already spread across social media like wildfire.
This is the exact moment that workers on the @Youtube Music team learned they were being laid off by @Google – as they were testifying in front of their local Austin city council. pic.twitter.com/N4GnMKda4A
— Alphabet Workers Union (AWU-CWA) (@AlphabetWorkers) March 1, 2024
“Our jobs have ended today, effective immediately,” said Katie Marie Marschner, an Alphabet Workers Union member, shakily in the clip. Marschner and Benedict were attending the city council meeting to push a resolution calling on Google and Cognizant, a professional services company, to negotiate with union members. As Benedict testified to city council members, Marschner received a text about the lay-offs from her co-workers, who’d been let go in a scheduled weekly team meeting.
“Basically, Cognizant flew in all their top HR goons from Arizona and Florida and a bunch of Pinkerton security guards to come in and deliver the news to us,” said Marschner in a follow-up video posted to Twitter. “I burst into tears.” In 2023, the team of more than 40 YouTube Music contractors participated in two strikes: a month-long one in February, urging Cognizant to change its return to the office policy and a single-day pause in September.
In April 2023, YouTube contractors joined the Alphabet Workers Union for better pay and working conditions. Under their current agreement, the workers were making as little as $19 an hour and had no sick pay, according to the Washington Post. Since unionizing, Google has refused to bargain with the contractors- a move that the National Labor Relations Board deemed illegal earlier this year.
This recent round of firings come at a time where Austin, which became hotbed for tech talent in recent years, is struggling with its tech economy. Companies like Apple, Google, and Meta fled from California for cheaper taxes and living conditions in Texas during the pandemic. Now, these huge companies are starting to pack up their operations and leave the area after underestimating people’s willingness to return to the office without appropriate compensation, leaving a city of empty office buildings in its wake.
In a statement to the Verge, Google insisted that the decision to terminate the team’s employment was Cognizant’s, who claimed that the employees had reached the end of their agreed-upon business contract. However, the union says these lay-offs are textbook silencing tactics.
“This is Google attempting to fire us and make us go away,” said Marschner. “But we’re not done. And we won’t stop fighting.”
