Waymo cafeteria workers form union

Waymo office cafeteria workers are forming a union, according to NBC News. As the news agency notes, this makes them the latest group of people to organize at one of Silicon Valley's most important companies. Waymo foodservice staff are also following in the footsteps of the 4,000 Google cafeteria workers who quietly unionized during the COVID-19 pandemic. The self-driving technology company was an experimental unit under Google before becoming a subsidiary of Alphabet.

Like other Google restaurant workers, Waymo workers are employed by contractor Sodexo. Workers cited the high cost of living in the Bay Area where Alphabet's offices are located as the reason they want to unionize. They said their $24-an-hour salary was not enough to live comfortably in the city, where rents are astronomical, and their health plan was prohibitively expensive. The workers are also demanding better pay and benefits, as they don't get the same perks as full-time Alphabet employees.

Organizers of the organizing efforts at Waymo told NBC News they have already collected signatures from the majority of workers. Sodexo said it "respects the rights of [its] employees to unionize or not," but did not say whether it would voluntarily recognize the union. If so, workers will need to apply for election to the NLRB in order to join the other Alphabet cafeteria workers at Unite Here.

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