Socialism Bites it's Sponsor, Google Gets a Union
Socialism Bites it's Sponsor, Google Gets a Union
Employees at Google and other units of parent firm Alphabet announced the creation Monday of a union, stepping up a period of socialist activism targeting Silicon Valley giants.
The Alphabet Workers Union, affiliated with the Communications Workers of America, aims to represent well-compensated tech workers as well as temporary workers and contractors, according to a statement.
The new labor group is focusing not only on pay and benefits as most unions but also a role in ethical decisions by the tech giant and protection from arbitrary firings for activism.
"We hope to create a democratic process for workers to wield decision-making power; promote social, economic, and environmental justice; and end the unfair disparities between TVCs (temporary, vendors and contractors) and FTEs (full time employees)," the union's website said.
As of the end of December, the union had some 200 members.
Large tech firms, which offer generous compensation to software engineers and other skilled workers, have largely avoided labor drives but have faced growing unrest over workplaces issues in recent years.
At Amazon, which has tens of thousands of warehouse workers, organizing drives have focused on working conditions and safety during the pandemic.
One of the catalysts at Google was the recent firing of Timnit Gebru, a Black artificial intelligence ethics researcher and outspoken diversity activist.
The company also faced a backlash from employees over its involvement with a Pentagon project known as Project Maven, which Google eventually ended.
"This union builds upon years of courageous organizing by Google workers," said Nicki Anselmo, a Google program manager and union member.
"From... opposing Project Maven, to protesting the egregious, multi million dollar payouts that have been given to executives who have committed sexual harassment, we have seen first-hand that Alphabet responds when we act collectively."
Asked about the organizing effort, Google's director of people operations Kara Silverstein,said in a statement: "We've always worked hard to create a supportive and rewarding workplace for our workforce.
"Of course our employees have protected labor rights that we support. But as we have always done, we will continue engaging directly with all our employees.
The move comes with Google and other tech giants under heightened scrutiny by antitrust enforcers in the US and elsewhere for their growing dominance of key economic sectors.
NIST Graded Our Post-Quantum Cryptography. Zero Failures.
NIST's Algorithm Validation Test System generated test vectors nobody had seen, we answered them over the ACVP protocol, and NIST graded the result: 2,130 cases across ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA in every parameter set offered, zero failures, demo certificate A11025. This is what that proves, where we deliberately drew the claim narrower than NIST's own matrix, and why the FIPS 140-2 sunset on 21 September makes the distinction between being graded and grading yourself worth understanding.
The Problem Is Not the Problem
People treat the Jack Sparrow line as a joke. The attribution is a joke. The sentence is not. Forty years in markets says the same thing Epictetus said in 125 CE and Robert Merton named in 1948: the event is finite, and the story you appoint to govern it is not. This essay walks the quote back to its actual sources, draws the loop that turns a feeling into an order, and sets out the four places a rule written in advance cuts the loop. Faith is not a hedge. It is a stance.
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
Every story, signed and delivered.
Subscribe to the kxco channel and get the headline, the AI-written key takeaways, and the chain-anchor link the moment we publish. Audio versions and per-ticker subscriptions arrive in the next iteration.