The cafeteria employees at Waymo’s places of work are forming a union, in keeping with NBC News. As the information group notes, that makes them the most recent group of individuals to prepare at certainly one of Silicon Valley’s most distinguished firms. Waymo’s meals service personnel are additionally following within the footsteps of the 4,000 Google cafeteria employees who quietly unionized in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. The autonomous driving tech firm was an experimental unit below Google earlier than it turned an Alphabet subsidiary. 

Like Google’s different meals service employees, Waymo’s are employed by contracting agency Sodexo. Workers cited the excessive value of residing within the Bay Area the place Alphabet’s places of work are situated as the rationale why they wish to unionize. They mentioned their $24-per-hour pay is not sufficient to reside adequately within the metropolis, the place rents are astronomical, and that their well being plan is prohibitively costly. The employees are additionally asking for higher therapy and advantages, since they do not get pleasure from the identical perks as full-time Alphabet staff. 

Organizers for the unionization efforts at Waymo advised NBC News that they’ve already gathered signatures from majority of the employees. Sodexo mentioned that it “respects the rights of [its] employees to unionize or not to unionize” however did not say whether or not it should voluntarily acknowledge the union. If it does, the employees must file for an NLRB election to have the ability to be a part of the opposite Alphabet cafeteria employees at Unite Here.