Empowered Workers Are a Bulwark Against Illegal Monopoly

Stephen McMurtry is the Communications Chair of the Alphabet Workers-CWA and a Senior Software Engineer at Google.

Last week, US District Court Judge Amit Mehta issued his decision on remedies in the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google’s search monopoly. The ruling was widely viewed as a victory for Google, as the judge rejected most of the DOJ’s proposed remedies as “overreach” and accepted Google’s claim that it now competes in a broader information retrieval market being rapidly upended by the rise of LLM-powered chatbots and search engines such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthorpic’s Claude, Perplexity’s search engine, and even Google’s own Gemini chatbot. Google still faces a ban on exclusive distribution agreements and some data sharing requirements—a far cry from the DOJ’s push for divestment of Chrome and Android and a blanket prohibition on distribution agreements with partners such as Apple.

Unremarked in much of the analysis of the decision is Judge Mehta’s dismissal of the government’s proposed worker protections, limited as they were. The Justice Department had requested that the court protect “persons” and “associations” from retaliation if they filed complaints or cooperated with proceedings related to Google’s compliance with the final judgment. The judge declared these prohibitions overly broad. The word “worker” appears nowhere in the final judgment, and “employee” appears only four times, with the judge writing that Google had too many employees and subsidiaries to possibly train them all on compliance as the DOJ had proposed.

Alphabet Workers Union-CWA, a pre-majority union with over a thousand members, believes the absence of robust worker protections was a glaring oversight in the Department of Justice’s proposed remedy to begin with, making the court’s final judgment all the more troubling.

In May, our union filed an amicus brief in the trial, the first of its kind from employees at a Big Tech company, as the government pursues antitrust actions against several industry giants. Our filing urged the court to protect and empower Google’s workers while considering remedies to what Judge Mehta himself ruled to be an illegal monopoly back in August of 2024. While the most disruptive remedies did not come to pass, we still believe that Google workers deserve strong anti-retaliation protections to safeguard both their jobs and the public interest. Our brief detailed Google’s history of retaliation against workers who disagree with the company’s business practices—a pattern that could deter employees from raising compliance issues and emphasized how job protections and unionization can serve the public’s interest when worker concerns are incorporated into antitrust enforcement.

Google workers have a long history of publicly contesting the company’s employment and business practices. In 2018, the Women’s Walkout protested golden parachutes for executives accused of sexual misconduct. The following year, employees raised concerns about government contracts and Google’s retention of a so-called “union avoidance” firm. In 2020, Dr. Timnit Gebru spoke out after being asked to edit a paper critiquing racially-biased AI models. In each case, the workers behind these efforts were forced out of the company and faced retaliation.

The DOJ’s final proposal included limited protections for workers. But to truly counter the chilling effect of Google’s record of retaliation and to empower workers to speak up, such protections need to be significantly strengthened. When workers are silenced, the public pays the price.

Workers are a crucial line of defense against unlawful or noncompliant behavior by management. We see it first. Yet too often, fear of reprisals and the instinct of self-preservation keep workers from speaking out. When workers have a union, and when the union’s legitimacy is recognized, those calculations can change.

Today’s whistleblower protections trace back to unionized railroad workers who, more than a century ago, spoke out against unsafe conditions that endangered both them and the public. Unionized workers are better positioned to combat unfair and harmful corporate behavior because they hold well-established rights to strike, contest wrongful firings, oppose unlawful constraints, and negotiate for better practices. For example, during this antitrust case, our union mobilized and filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board against an illegal gag order prohibiting us from discussing the matter. In response to our collective action, Google rescinded the rule.

US antitrust actions too often ignore workers’ concerns, and in some cases have directly undermined them. A narrow focus on competition in consumer markets obscures critical power dynamics within companies, particularly those between workers and employers, which contribute to shaping market structure and outcomes. The breakup of AT&T in the 1980s, frequently invoked as inspiration for today’s antitrust push, is a telling example. The government rebuffed calls to address unionized workers’ interests and, over the next decade, nearly 200,000 jobs were lost. Productivity and innovation suffered as networks were duplicated, while workers faced chronic job insecurity, displacement, and stagnating incomes.

Four years after our launch, Alphabet Workers Union-CWA remains the only wall-to-wall union at a major US tech company, at a moment when several of those firms are subject to federal antitrust prosecutions. Judge Mehta had an opportunity to set a precedent for how workers’ interests and concerns will factor into Big Tech antitrust enforcement, but failed to do so. Workers at other tech giants will surely take notice.

Communications Workers of America, the nation’s largest union of communications and media workers and the parent union of Alphabet Workers Union-CWA, has worked with companies to implement labor principles guaranteeing workers’ freedom to form unions and build their power without company interference. One such agreement was enacted to protect Microsoft and Activision employees during the companies’ merger.

Google and other tech companies could take similar steps to protect workers in the face of current and future antitrust action. Strengthening workers’ structural power can limit the need for aggressive future enforcement and remedies by empowering them to push back against anticompetitive conduct as it happens. It will also send a message to workers across the tech industry that those who build technology have a voice in how it is put to use, and that speaking out in the public interest should not come at the cost of their livelihoods. Sadly, the court has declined to take this course of action in the Google search case. But tech workers will have other opportunities to assert their role in the near future.

Technology moves fast, and courts move slow. Judge Mehta may be right that Google’s search monopoly has been eroded organically by the evolution of the broader information retrieval market. What is beyond dispute is that the company’s search monopoly existed for more than a decade, distorting the market and harming consumers and competitors alike. Had workers been empowered from the outset, much of that harm, along with years of costly antitrust litigation, might have been avoided. Centering the role of workers as a vital check on corporate power and an essential voice in shaping fair and competitive markets is a true innovation whose time has come.