Google AI workers vote to unionise in a bid to resist military contracts

This week, members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) and Unite at the London office of Google DeepMind have submitted a letter to management that they now intend to seek formal union recognition.

DeepMind’s UK workers voted to unionise in April, and the application has come after significant internal unrest following Google’s decision to drop its pledge against developing AI for military or government surveillance purposes. An anonymous DeepMind employee wrote in the Tribune that:

When several hundred employees signed a petition against this change, Google chose to ignore it. For many of us working in DeepMind, this lack of transparency and employee engagement was part of a much broader trend of altering and changing policy to meet commercial demands, and applying an increasingly hands-on approach from Google in doing so.

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Our members want the ability to step away from work that violates their personal morals. Many of us at DeepMind work here because we bought into the mission to ‘build AI responsibility to benefit humanity’. Even though these military contracts make a mockery of that slogan, some work continues to happen in our offices that reflect it, and union members work on many applications of cutting-edge technology that contribute to the social good.

Their demands include an end to use of Google AI by Israel and the US military and restoring the scrapped commitment not to make AI weapons or surveillance tools, the creation of an independent ethics oversight body and the individual right to refuse to contribute to projects on moral grounds,” said the CWU.

CWU National Officer for Tech, John Chadfield, said:

This is a really important moment where tech workers at Google’s frontier AI lab are connecting with some of the most oppressed people in communities around the world in meaningful ways, based on foundational values of solidarity and trade unionism.

By exercising their rights to collectivise, they are in a strong position to demand their employer stop circling the ethical drain of military-industrial contracts, echoing the sentiment of many working people in the UK and elsewhere.

A spokesperson for Google wrote in a statement:

Google UK recently received a letter from Unite and the Communications Workers Union requesting recognition for Google DeepMind UK employees. We have always valued constructive dialogue with employees and we’ll remain focused on creating a positive and successful workplace.” A second spokesperson added that the company was “not aware of any vote to officially unionise.”