When people get laid off from a company, they usually find out either through an email or a surprise meeting with HR. It’s pretty rare that one finds out in public, for the world to see, that their employer is giving them the boot. Well, that’s exactly what happened to a group of employees at YouTube during a recent City Council hearing in Austin, Texas.
In a video that went viral on social media platform X, which has so far garnered over 1.4 million views, an employee at Google’s (GOOG) YouTube Music, found out in the middle of his testimony at an Austin City Council hearing that his team was being laid off.
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“Not to interrupt, but they just laid us all off,” said another fellow employee, who spoke into the stand’s microphone. “Our jobs are ended today, effective immediately.”
A City Council member on the panel then informed the employee that his time was “expired,” and that the council will “follow-up” on the situation later.
this is the exact moment our coworkers found out we had been laid off while speaking in front of city council pic.twitter.com/IcsCszGe3Z
— jacob (@peepaw_) March 1, 2024
The workers at YouTube Music are subcontracted by tech company Cognizant, and they were laid off due to the expiration of the contract between Cognizant and Google.
The less than 50 employees at YouTube music are members of the Alphabet Workers Union. Alphabet is the company that owns Google. The union was testifying during the Austin City Council hearing to call on Google to bargain with its unionized workers at YouTube Music.
“On Thursday, February 29, Google informed workers on the YouTube Music Content Operations Team that they would be laid off, hours before a scheduled vote by the Austin City Council on a resolution calling on Google to bargain with these same workers in good faith,” said the Alphabet Workers Union in a press release.
The union claims that the workers at YouTube Music won a union election with Alphabet Workers Union-CWA last year in April, and as a response, Google refused to bargain with them, which was a decision that was ruled unlawful by the National Labor Relations Board.
Sign with logos for Google and the Google owned video streaming service YouTube at the Googleplex, the Silicon Valley headquarters of search engine and technology company Google Inc in Mountain View, California, April 14, 2018.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
The workers at YouTube Music unionized because they claim that they are “paid as little as $19 dollars an hour and receive minimal benefits,” according to the press release. They also claim that they are “forced to work multiple jobs to make ends meet.”
Many of the workers also joined a strike against Google/Alphabet last year in February after they were being pushed by the company to return to in-person work with “voluntary termination” being the only other option if they refused to do so.
The union claims that shortly after it learned about the layoffs during the Feb. 29 Austin City Council hearing, the council passed its resolution.
“This is devastating. We have been fighting for years now to get Google, one of the most powerful and well-resourced companies in the world, to negotiate with us so that we could make a living in exchange for the work we do to make their products better,” said Jack Benedict, a member of AWU-CWA. “It is disgusting that Google has taken this path when confronted with its workers’ modest demands to be treated fairly on the job.”
The Alphabet Workers Union pointed TheStreet to its press release when asked for comment.
The tech industry is continuing to be hit by a plethora of layoffs. So far in 2024, 186 tech companies have laid off their employees, resulting in 49,386 workers losing their jobs, according to data from Layoffs.fyi. The data also revealed that 15,379 tech employees have been laid off last month.
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