Welcome to the Tech Mem Right Home for Monday, January 4th, the first day of 2021.

I'm Brian McCullough today.

Google slash Alphabet Workers launch an official union drive. We've got a date for the

Galaxy Unpacked event. Microsoft wants to give Windows a good scrubbing this year. Everyone wants a piece of share chat.

Gazelle is getting out of the trade-in business and LG doesn't want to give up on

TV screens you can hide away when not in use. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

Earlier last year we spent some time talking about a sort of civil war going on inside of Google. A lot of it involved activism and

politics, but some of it also involved unionization movements and the

tactics management was allegedly using to, shall we say,

discourage such organizing?

Well, things seem to have come to a head right away in 2021

as a group of over 200 Google and Alphabet workers have announced their plan to form a union

which would be open to both full-fledged employees and contractors.

They are being aided in this effort by the Communication Workers of America

Union's campaign to organize digital employees.

The erstwhile union is calling itself the Alphabet Workers Union quoting Tech Crunch.

Of the roughly 227 workers who have so far signed on to support the union,

they have all committed to set aside 1% of the yearly compensation to go toward union dues. The bulk of the

workers who have signed on are mostly based in offices in the San Francisco Bay Area

and one in Cambridge. This is historic, The first union at a major tech company by and for

all tech workers, Dylan Baker, a software engineer at Google said in a statement.

We will elect representatives. We will make decisions democratically, we will pay dues and we will hire

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