On a corp-cultural level it's interesting this is originating at Google, as opposed to say Amazon which is generally considered a more burnout-causing/crushing place to work on the engineering side in some teams. The Google employees I've talked to all seemed remarkably uncynical about their jobs, and still took a certain amount of pride in working at their company. I can contrast this with Amazon, Microsoft, and (to a lesser degree) Facebook employees who sort of hold their jobs at arm's length from themselves; not much of their identity is wrapped up in it. For union organization at higher payscales, maybe peoples' desire to better their workplace will only be effective if they care about their workplace to begin with.
Essentially the different is that Google is so incredibly culty that people refuse to leave even when they're grossly mistreated and the company does incredibly unethical things. Everyone in big tech has job mobility, so for someone to care to unionize, they have to not want to leave.
So where in other tech companies, unhappy employees leave, at Google they try to "fix" it, which has led to these unionization type efforts, with wider goals around making the company behave.
I absolutely think that the fact that many Googlers' primary social identity is that they're a Googler is why this is starting there and not another FAANG.
That being said, without the employees who could leave, but choose not to, Google would not survive. Hiring underpaid immigrants can only get you so far.
If the employees who could leave organize for the benefit of employees who can’t, isn’t that precisely unionizing? That’s my jab here. I don’t really know/care about how great certain employees have it, I care that several other employees are systematically abused and there’s no check on their power.
