The newly announced Alphabet Workers Union, as more than 200 employees of Google and parent company Alphabet Inc. are calling themselves, appears unlikely to seek formal recognition by Alphabet through the National Labor Relations Board process, at least in the near future. That’s understandable for a couple of reasons.
For one thing, it hasn’t been easy for unions to make board-certified bargaining units out of information-industry workers.
The NLRB has received only 247 representation petitions from information industry workers in the past five years combined. (Across all industries, about 1,800 petitions are filed per year.) Only 51% of those ...