Workers at Appen, a company contracted with Google, will get a pay hike from $10 an hour to $14.50 per hour, according to the Alphabet Workers Union-Communication Workers of America (AWU-CWA).
The AWU-CWA is the union representing salaried and contract workers in the Google-parent company Alphabet.
The pay raise is still a few centavos short of the $15 an-hour salary that AWU-CWA is seeking.
Wage Increase Does Not Meet Google's Standard Pay for Workers
Late last year, the workers were informed that they had won their first-ever worker raise case at RaterLabs, according to CNET.
The workers who will receive a pay raise are Google contract workers who are responsible for training and rating the engine's search results.
According to an AWU-CWA press release, the workers are based at RaterLabs, an AI training vendor.
The workers, known as raters, were previously paid as little as $10 an hour. With the raise, they will now be paid $14 or $14.50 an hour, depending on their experience.
Based on the estimates of AWU-CWA, the pay raise will impact between 3,000 and 5,000 workers. The total collective salary increase will be about $10 million, according to VICE.
According to Michelle Curtis, an Alphabet contract worker, and a union member, she did not receive a raise since she started as a rater at the company eight years ago.
She added that while $14.50 is a step forward, it still does not meet the standard set by Google for its extended workforce which is $15. Likewise, it does not include the other benefits.
Google set wages and benefits standards for all of its provisioned extended workforce in the US in 2019.
It stated that all members of Google's provisioned extended workforce, working in the US, should be paid $15 per hour or more.
The compliance date for the standard was set in 2020. This past May, workers began to demand that the company enforce the same standard on its contractors.
After negotiations with RaterLabs and its parent company Appen in October, the company announced the salary increase on December 21, 2022. The wage increase took effect on January 1, 2023.
Read Also: 4,000 Google Cafeteria Workers Have Joined Unions During the Pandemic
Wage Increase for Raters is a Victory for the Union
The wage increase for the raters of Appen is a major victory for AWU-CWA, which consists of both employees and contractors at Alphabet.
AWU-CWA is different from a traditional union because it does not have collective bargaining power. Instead, the union pushes the company toward reform through activism and organization efforts.
The AWU-CWA did not issue further comments beyond its press release. Likewise, Google and Appen didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
The majority of Google's revenue comes from ads. It is fueled by the company's massive presence in online search.
The company posted $54.4 billion in advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2022. While it is the engineers who work to tweak Google's search, it's raters who evaluate the results to ensure that users get the best and most relevant ones.
Within big tech companies, unionization is seen as a larger trend. For instance, Amazon workers formed the first union at one of its warehouses, and game testers at Microsoft-owned ZeniMax also formed the first union at the software giant.
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