Last week, employees at Google parent Alphabet Inc. called for better treatment of staff during the layoff process in an open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai, after the company announced it was cutting a further 12,000 jobs. The kinds of consideration workers asked for included freezing new hires, seeking voluntary redundancies before compulsory ones, giving priority to laid-off workers for job vacancies, and letting workers finish scheduled periods of paid time off, such as parental and bereavement leave.
The letter, and the nature of the demands, are an indication of the frustration and mistrust following mass layoffs at Google earlier in the year, in which many employees had their access terminated in the middle of the night. Google’s approach to firing seemed to run counter to the company’s long-stated culture of employee well-being.
