Google employees circulate petition demanding abortion benefits for contractors

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

More than 650 Google employees have signed a petition calling on the company to extend abortion related health benefits to contractors and better protect user privacy in the wake of a Supreme Court decision.

Employees of the company wrote that they were disappointed in the company's response to the ruling of the Supreme Court.

After the Supreme Court decision, the chief people officer of the company told employees their health insurance would cover out-of-state medical procedures.

Half of the company's workforce is made up of temporary, vendor, and contract workers.

TVCs have been doing a lot of important work for the company and getting zero percent of the recognition, pay, or benefits that they claim to give employees. There is a lot of carelessness there.

Workers are asking for additional sick days because they will need to travel a lot to get healthcare.

Users who visit abortion clinics, domestic violence shelters, and addiction treatment facilities will have their location history deleted after they visit. The company said it would push back on excessive demands from law enforcement.

Employees want the company to make sure that searches about abortion are never saved, handed over to law enforcement, or treated as a crime.

Facebook gave law enforcement agents in Nebraska private messages between a mother and daughter who were accused of carrying out an illegal abortion.

Less than one percent of the global workforce signed the letter. Tech workers are unhappy with the way their companies have responded to the Supreme Court ruling. According to the New York Times, employees at Meta were told to stop talking about abortion on internal forums.

You can read the petition from the workers.

Protect our worker’s rights

We, the undersigned, recognize that all Alphabet workers, of all genders, are impacted by the overturning of Roe v. Wade and are disappointed in Alphabet’s response and influence on this ruling.

Alphabet has continued to make access to reproductive and gender affirming healthcare a “women’s issue” by only providing women@ Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) with listening sessions, and using gendered language in their communication with workers when this is an issue that affects all of us.

In order to align with Google’s core values (go/3-google-values), we demand that Alphabet acknowledges the impact this Supreme Court ruling has on all its workers and to immediately do the following:

1. Protect all workers’ access to reproductive healthcare by setting a reproductive healthcare standard in the US Wages and Benefits Standards (go/alphabet-tvc-benefits-standards) including:

a. Extending the same travel-for-healthcare benefits offered to FTEs to TVCs.

b. Adding minimum of 7 days of additional sick time because workers will need to travel for significant periods to obtain health services.

c. Increasing FTE & TVC reimbursement amounts for travel to $150 per night. $50 is NOT a viable reimbursement for a hotel stay in most states, and does not address childcare or lost wages.

d. Publishing a TVC transparency report, detailing vendors’ compliance to the Alphabet/Google US Wages and Benefits Standards. For example, details on why certain roles are exempt, and timelines for vendors to come into compliance.

2. Protect our government from corporate influence. Alphabet must stop lobbying politicians and any political organizations, through NetPAC or any other means because these politicians were responsible for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and continue to infringe on other human rights issues related to voting access and gun control.

3. Protect our users and customers from having their data used against them and addressing the disinformation and misleading information as it pertains to abortion services and other reproductive healthcare services on all Alphabet platforms and products by:

a. Instituting immediate user data privacy controls for all health-related activity, for example, searching for reproductive justice, gender-affirming care, and abortion access information on Google must never be saved, handed over to law enforcement, or treated as a crime.

b. Fixing misleading search results related to abortion services by removing results for fake abortion providers.

c. No longer working with publishers of disinformation related to abortion services who violate AdSense’s publishers policies related to unreliable and harmful claims about a major health crisis.

d. Providing transparency into ad revenue sharing with Google custom search so that abortion services that pay for Google ads don’t inadvertently have their ad revenue go to organizations that are actively working against them.

In order to meet these demands, we call on Alphabet to create a dedicated task-force with 50% employee representation, responsible for implementing changes across all products and our company, just like Alphabet did for handling the COVID-19 pandemic.