Hello and welcome to ETIWI Podcast, Voices on the World of Work.

I am Bianca Luna Fabres, communication officer here at the Institute, and I'll be guiding you through the podcast.

You might have seen in the press that at the very beginning of 2021, Google employees, based in the States, decided to form our workers' union, called the Alphabet Workers.

In this episode, we will try to understand what has happened within the company,

and also what this means for transnational trade unionism.

Before we actually get to the episode, let me introduce you to our guest.

Stan de Spigelare, he is senior researcher here at the Institute,

and he is also visiting professor at the University of Ghent.

Hi Stan, it's such a pleasure to have you here.

Hi, Bianca, nice to be here, but just first as a disclaimer maybe.

When we're going to talk about Google, I'm not going to, I'm not pretending that I know all the ins and outs of the organizing Google, what's happening now.

What I'm going to do, what we are going to do is try to put the Google organizing

into a bit of a broader perspective in the trade union world.

So for those who want to get the inside story of the organizing at Google,

I would definitely advise him to listen to such podcasts as the belabored episodes with Alex Hanna.

And I think also the Wall Street Journal did a nice episode.

It's amazing, right, that Google is organizing

because we've been often told that it's such a great company to work in.

Could you perhaps give us a bit of background story?

Yeah, I think that's the most interesting part about Google.

If we go back to, let's say, 2017, nobody could have predicted such an organizing happening at Google.

What was the image of Google at 2017?

...