The Alphabet Workers Union delivered a 4,500-signature petition to CEO Sundar Pichai's Mountain View office demanding guaranteed severance, performance-quota reforms, and extended paid leave options. Google declined to respond publicly or to press inquiries.

The Alphabet Workers Union delivered a petition signed by 4,500 Google employees to CEO Sundar Pichai's Mountain View office on Thursday, demanding guaranteed severance, an end to performance quotas used to manage headcount, and the option to convert severance into extended paid leave. More than 100 workers rallied outside Googleplex the same day. Google has not responded publicly, and declined or failed to answer media requests for comment, per The Guardian, KQED, and Business Insider.

Union organizers described being "greeted with closed doors and no response for the most part," per The Guardian. The petition was left with a staff member in Pichai's office; no senior executive engaged with the delivery. AWU President Parul Koul — a Google software engineer — called it "the largest piece of employee feedback that Google has received about job security."

The demands are prospective, not a response to a single announced layoff round. Koul described the action as a reckoning with rolling, undisclosed cuts. "Make no mistake: this is a company that is enjoying massive, unprecedented success," she told The Guardian. "These layoffs and cuts are not difficult decisions, but simply profit being put over the people that make this run." Senior software engineer Kaylee Lubick, also an AWU member, told KALW: "We're just lines on a spreadsheet trying to make the number go up."

That framing sits uncomfortably against Alphabet's own language. The company's most recent SEC filing — Q3 2025 — shows 190,167 employees, up year-over-year, and Alphabet is profitable. But at that same earnings call, CFO Anat Ashkenazi described workforce adjustments as "not a one-time type of effort, but rather an ongoing way in which we manage the business." Workers demanding written protections against that explicitly "ongoing" management process is precisely the gap the petition is trying to force into the open.

The action joins a rough stretch for tech labor. Earlier this month, Meta sent layoff notices to roughly 8,000 employees — a 10% cut — and now faces a federal lawsuit in Oakland alleging its AI-assisted screening disproportionately targeted workers on protected medical leave. The AWU petition is a different instrument: forward-looking political pressure rather than remedial litigation, aimed at Alphabet committing to terms before cuts happen rather than after.

What the AWU cannot do, structurally, is compel a response. It operates as a minority union without a collective bargaining agreement at Alphabet, meaning its leverage is reputational, not contractual. No California WARN Act filing from Alphabet tied to the workers' described rolling cuts has been publicly located. The ones to watch: whether Google acknowledges the petition at all in the coming weeks, and whether the signature count and the next earning call — where Ashkenazi's "ongoing" framing will be asked about again — give the AWU a harder number to point at.