| Hi, this is Josh Eidelson, Bloomberg's labor reporter. Google workers rang in 2021 with a new chapter in their labor activism: A union that's not officially recognized as a union. The group, the Alphabet Workers Union, was announced earlier this month and isn't formally acknowledged by Google management or certified by the U.S. government. Its leaders say right now they aren't even trying to be. Instead of seeking to win formal collective bargaining with management—a central way unions build and deploy power—the tech giant's workers will use protest, publicity and pressure campaigns. It's been a big few weeks for the debate over labor in tech. The National Labor Relations Board ruled last week that Amazon.com Inc. workers in Alabama can start voting by mail in February on whether to unionize their warehouse, after months of wrangling over issues like which workers would get to vote and whether they'd have to do so in-person during the pandemic. On Thursday, Instacart Inc. said it would cut about 1,900 jobs, including the only 10 employees who had won collective bargaining there. And the incoming administration of President Joe Biden could portend big changes in how contract workforces are treated. These and other recent events reflect how tech workers are confronting the current limits of U.S. labor law. Such examples also showcase how organizers and workers are trying to leverage, transform, or—as at Google—largely sidestep the existing system. "There was no question in our minds that we wanted it to be a union for everybody in the workplace," the Alphabet Workers Union's recently elected executive chair, software engineer Parul Koul, told me in an interview for this week's Businessweek. That includes Alphabet workers employed through staffing firms, who would've had a harder time winning the right to negotiate with Alphabet, and independent contractors, who legally have no right to organize at all. In 2018, such contract workers became the majority of Alphabet's global workforce. Even for direct employees, winning collective bargaining can be an arduous, risky and near-impossible process: Corporations can legally force workers to attend meetings full of ominous predictions about the consequences of unionizing. And if they get caught illegally firing activists, the most executives generally have to fear is someday having to reinstate them with backpay, without any punitive damages or personal liability. Googlers aren't alone in pursuing a less official route. A web of networks have sprung up in recent decades to represent workers in industries including domestic work, taxi driving and agriculture. Such groups often resemble the sort of unions that existed before companies or the government formally recognized them, seeking to force change without any official right to negotiate. But such organizing is hard to do, and still risky, as the firings of prominent Google activists in recent years suggest. Alphabet's labor group has tripled in size since it was announced and now includes more than 750 people. The company has about 130,000 employees total, not counting its large contract staff. Success for the group will depend in part on how quickly the workers can grow their still-small ranks and demonstrate concrete victories. In the meantime, labor activists in all sectors are pressing the new president to deliver sweeping changes like rebooting our decades-old workplace protections. But the Democrats' narrow congressional majorities and resistance to abolishing the Senate's 60-vote filibuster rule make that a long shot. There is some good political news for activists, though. Biden started his presidency by urging the resignation of the Labor Board's Donald Trump-appointed general counsel, a former management attorney who had deemed Uber drivers to be contractors lacking labor rights. Within hours of Biden's swearing in, he was fired. —Josh Eidelson | 
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