Walkout at Google Zurich
Today, 250 Google employees in Zurich walked away from their desks in protest and in solidarity with those laid off by the company worldwide and are calling on the company to refrain from further layoffs.
Google’s parent company Alphabet announced in mid-January plans to lay off approximately 12,000 employees worldwide. While the affected employees in the US and Canada were already informed, it remains unclear how many are to be laid off at many other locations.
With today´s walkout, Google employees in Zurich are protesting against the mass layoffs and are showing solidarity with their colleagues whose employment has already been terminated. «We Googlers stand up for each other. The mass layoffs without obvious economic necessity are not acceptable.», says a Google employee known to syndicom.
The employees at Google Zurich demand that the company engage in dialogue with workers to thoroughly and seriously examine alternatives to layoffs. If redundancies cannot be avoided, they expect the company to minimise the consequences for those affected with an acceptable social plan. For example, many non-EU nationals work at Google Zurich whose right of residence in Switzerland expires in the event of dismissal.
syndicom is the Swiss trade union for the IT sector and has a significant number of members at Google Zurich. As their representative, we stand with them during this difficult process of mass dismissal and offer advice and support.
