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Alphabet (Google's parent company) employees signed a petition for demands to CEO Pichai for a better layoff process

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Per Bloomberg

Employees at Google's parent company, Alphabet, have just signed a petition and an open letter detailing their demands for the company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, regarding its layoff process. The letter detailed the different demands of company employees.

Here are some of the demands made by employees.

  • Freezing new hires
  • Go through voluntary redundancies before compulsory ones
  • Prioritize laid-off workers for new job vacancies
  • Allow paid time off periods scheduled to be completed (including bereavement and parental leave)

The letter included lines regarding the impacts of Alphabet's decision and how the workers' voices were inadequate. The letter also highlighted the importance of staff working together.

“The impacts of Alphabet’s decision to reduce its workforce are global... Nowhere have workers’ voices adequately been considered, and we know that as workers we are stronger together than alone.”

The report detailed that compared to the US, where workers lost their jobs immediately, Google has been slower in laying off workers in other places, like Europe, due to strong labor protection.

The letter was organized by these employee groups.

  • The Alphabet Workers Union
  • United Tech and Allied Workers
  • UNI Group

In February, Google announced that it would be implementing a new desk-sharing strategy in the next quarter. It noted that the reason behind these changes was to ensure that the use of its real estate was more "efficient."

This included employees sharing desks and alternating days with their other desk-mates. The company specifically asked that its cloud employees and partners would participate in this new strategy.

Amid pressure to stay visible in the AI market, Google said that it would be reporting its AI investments in the first quarter of 2023. This came as its competitor, Microsoft, has been publicly open about adding ChatGPT to its Bing, which is now live.

Now, OpenAI already has an update to its popular ChatGPT-3 with better capabilities called the GPT-4.

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Bloomberg