(Bloomberg) -- An Alphabet Inc. vendor, Hitachi Ltd., illegally restricted a group of Google artificial intelligence contract staff from discussing their pay and fired one of them for starting conversations about wages, a union alleged in a federal complaint.
The Alphabet Workers Union filed the US National Labor Relations Board case Tuesday against Hitachi’s subsidiary GlobalLogic Inc., which it said manages a group of around 1,800 employees doing rating, labeling and training for Google’s AI products. The complaint accuses GlobalLogic of creating a policy prohibiting discussion of wages in its online internal forums, while allowing employees to discuss other non-work topics in those “online social spaces.” The company created the policy in response to employee Ricardo Levario raising pay issues, and then fired him for it, according to the complaint, which said his termination “resulted in a chill” on his co-workers’ willingness to exercise their rights.
The filing is the latest controversy over the treatment of Alphabet’s sprawling network of contract staff, who became the majority of its global workforce in 2018. AWU, an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America, said Alphabet should be ensuring that vendors like GlobalLogic respect workers’ legal rights. “It just makes me wonder what their stance is,” Levario said in an interview. “We’re working on a product that is so valuable to Google… When we advocate for better conditions and challenge the status quo, we’re intimidated or fired.”
Levario, a task lead on a team of Google AI “super-raters,” said GlobalLogic rolled out its new “social spaces” policy this month, after he circulated a survey from AWU asking about employees’ pay, benefits, and other working conditions. He said GlobalLogic management also deleted posts on internal social channels that discussed working conditions, held a meeting with employees to discourage making more of them, and then told him last week he was being fired for violating the policy.
“These individuals are employees of Hitachi, not Alphabet,” a Google spokesperson said. “As the employer, Hitachi is responsible for the employment conditions of their workers.”
Google said it carefully chooses suppliers, expects them to treat workers fairly, and audits their compliance with its code of conduct.
GlobalLogic, a digital product engineering company, didn’t immediately comment.
In an audio recording shared by AWU, a manager can be heard urging employees to use internal channels to “share memes” but not content that “feels negative” to others. “Talk around what’s fair, money and days off and you know benefits and stuff like that, that’s not really something that is really work-appropriate to share with everyone – that’s more of a one-on-one thing,” the manager said. “I want people to have a good time, share jokes. You know, that stuff is good for the soul, it helps you get through the workday, it’s fun.” When it comes to “one-on-one issues,” they continued, “Not everybody needs to be invited to that type of party.”
US law protects the right of employees to discuss and take collective action about their working conditions, including the vast majority who – like Hitachi’s Google contract staff – are not formally represented by a union. The NLRB, the agency responsible for enforcing those collective action rights, investigates complaints and, if it finds merit in the allegations, can prosecute them before agency judges, whose rulings can be appealed to NLRB members in Washington and from there into federal court. The agency can order policies changed or workers reinstated with back pay, but lacks authority to hold executives personally liable or make companies pay punitive damages for violations.
During the Biden Administration, other groups of contract staff working on Google Help or YouTube Music voted to unionize with AWU, and secured rulings from the NLRB that Alphabet had enough control over them to legally be considered their boss and was obligated to negotiate with them. But Alphabet refused to enter talks, saying the workers were not its employees, and is contesting the issue in federal court. Unions like AWU now face more difficult terrain in such disputes: President Donald Trump last month fired two top Biden appointees at the NLRB, saying in a message obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request that he didn’t trust them to fairly consider employers’ interests. He faulted them in particular for their stance on when companies should be considered liable for the treatment of workers employed via another firm.
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