One of the most interesting things I've learned over the past 6 weeks has been how unfortunately narrow my focus had been while organizing at Google over the past 6-7 years.

Far too many people had previously fallen between the cracks as not being workers that we could help.

I have been a participant in, and in some cases, a leader of, more than a dozen active efforts to change Google, whether they are pushing for changes to internal product decisions that harm users, broad-scale petitions, or fighting for workers who suffered under Google.

But those actions, whether successful or not, failed in many cases to focus on the more immediate, practical, and material concerns to workers who I never heard from before, despite doing my best to listen. The things I was concerned about *for my own piece of mind* took lead.

I can see now how many opportunities were missed because of this. Workers who suffered sometimes horrific working conditions were excluded from the conversation; people who I could have taken steps to help were never on my radar in the first place. So many missed opportunities.

I am excited that AWU has opened the door to correcting some of that.

It's not just that AWU is a different structure--though it is. It's not just that it was created under a very different Google than the Google of 2015--though it was.

It is that there are now more voices.

Workers doing data annotation at $10/hour, with no ability to talk to their coworkers. Workers who lack sick time being forced to work in enclosed spaces in the middle of a pandemic, with no meaningful safety precautions possible.

These folks were never part of my activism.

Even the fight for ending forced arbitration--one of the most important fights I've been in at Google, in my opinion, for how it helps those who lacked the ability to correct systemic injustices--has to be attached with the caveat that TVCs + other bets remain under those rules.

I have always been happy to seek advice of prior organizers at Google when I have felt that I would benefit from their advice. I specifically came to organizers of the walkout and workers who experienced retaliation to ask advice on actions that AWU took in 2020.

At the same time, I recognized that I was doing something that was materially different than what had been done before. I was explicitly building a structure that could support hundreds, thousands of people doing the work that before had been done by dozens.

I fundamentally believe that November of 2019 was an important phase change in how organizing had to be done inside Google. While I had been organizing towards a formalized union before that, working with union members in multiple groups, that day changed everything for me.

It became clear that I had to very explicitly treat Google differently, because they were very clearly treating me differently, and my coworkers differently. The experiences that had gone before could no longer be repeated; the same tools didn't work. We had to change tactics.

I know that many people who left the company can't see that, and won't. If you organized at Google in 2018, and left before 2020, you didn't experience the same things that I did in the last year. Your experience and mine overlapped in the past, but there was a change.

By May of 2019, I was pushing to formalize a legal structure that could offer support for terminated workers. By Oct of 2019, we were explicitly trying to figure out how to motivate workers to fund it.

In Dec 2019, among folks I talked to, those questions were pretty moot.

Put simply: Among the people I was talking to, there was an understanding that what we needed was a union; that the people on the ground lacked the formal experience to do that work ourselves; and that we would benefit from a formalized organization to do that work.

That basis has led to the thing that is AWU today. I understand not everyone would do it the same way, but at every step along the way, I feel that the group that we worked with was committed to building what AWU is.

That was us. Me, and 20, then 50, then 100, now 800 workers.

I am proud that we got to where we are because now we have tools to make a bigger difference than we did before. We can do so in a way that lets people participate who would otherwise see participation as too risky. We can do so in a way that better protects individuals.

The experiences of the past aren't lost. No one is forgetting the work that we did on the walkout, on organizing together against Maven, or Dragonfly; on the work that was led by folks like @EricaJoy to fight for pay equality for marginalized workers.

But what I saw was a Google where even *talking to your coworkers in a room at the office* was seen as scary, for fear that Google's meeting room devices would record your conversations. People who newly switched to carrying two phones for fear of being spied on by the boss.

And at every step along the way I had to think: Who can I talk to without risk? Who can I talk to without spoiling the hard work we're doing?

In my work, I often told people there were two primary rules:

1. Don't get fired.
2. Don't get anyone else fired.

That was because I saw this as fundamental: in order to make change at Alphabet, we had to stay employed at Alphabet. It's the way that we maintain leverage; I can't have an impact on Google with tweets and press statements. I have to *be there*, have conversations with workers.

When I look at how far we've come, from a bunch of people scared of the security guards taking pictures of them gathering in public spaces, to 100+ people putting their picture on a website to say: I am AWU. I am proud.

Proud that we're standing together.

I don't doubt that a "small group of thoughtful, committed, [employees] can change the world."

But I think that making that group larger is one of the most effective ways that I have available to me to figure out what changes the world needs.

Organizing at Google is *hard*. It has always been hard, and it's getting harder every day. (That's what Google wants; they don't like being pushed to change! Corporations don't want to listen to employees; that's not in their business interest!)

I appreciate the work that I did with everyone before me. I feel like I learned from them; I listened; and I shared that experience--both my own, and things that I learned from the folks that inspired me to fight for change at Google.

But I also recognize that work was never enough. And I hope that together, we can fight to make even more change possible, because what matters has never been about "Who gets credit?"

It's "How can we best help workers?" (And through them: how can we best help the world?)

(My opinions are my own and not those of my employer. I have to add this, because if I don't, I literally have a written complaint in my HR file that is a "final written warning" prior to termination. When I decide to tweet about this stuff, it has to get pretty heavy first.)