Emmet Fraizer at The Nation reports: Ricardo Levario spent almost a decade working in Elementary Schools, but by 2023, he’d finally had enough. He quit his job without a backup option and he was a month into the job search when he received a cryptic message from a Linkedin Recruiter looking for Teachers. Levario started at GlobalLogic as one of the first 25 “Super Raters” assigned to work on Google’s AI (Artificial Intelligence) products. Business was booming. By Summer, GlobalLogic was hiring up to 20 people a week. When that wasn’t enough, they hired staffing agencies to bring on even more. At first, Levario was grateful. He had enjoyed playing around with ChatGPT when it became publicly available and he was excited about the prospect of a new career in Tech. His background in education felt relevant to the day-to-day work - he often found himself grading and rewriting AI responses or drafting detailed instructions used to train Google’s products. But the problems were becoming harder to ignore. Classified as Temporary (Worker) for an entire year, Levario was denied paid time off and holiday pay. He was eventually offered a small raise to go with his promotion, but 70% of other promoted Workers were not. Subcontractors, hired through staffing agencies, made only around two-thirds of their Co-Workers’ wages after the agencies took their cut. And in the first months of 2025, hundreds of Workers were laid off. GlobalLogic Workers might be developing Google products, but they don’t enjoy Google perks. “There’s no ping-pong tables and free lunch for these people,” says Shannon Wait, an Organizer with the Alphabet Workers Union. GlobalLogic, a subsidiary of the Multi-National Conglomerate Hitachi, employs about 1,400 raters under a contract with Google, which is a subsidiary of Alphabet. It’s a common set-up - since 2018, contractors have made up the majority of the workforce at Alphabet, working under inferior conditions and the constant threat of losing their jobs. That tangled corporate web can deter solidarity on the shop floor, but GlobalLogic Workers have moved to organize anyway. Levario was one of the most prominent of those Organizers - until this February, when he was fired amid mounting conflicts over the Union Campaign. While he and others have filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they have little legal recourse given President Trump’s incapacitation of the agency. Still, they haven’t given up. In April, GlobalLogic Employees released a demand letter calling for better pay parity and job security. “Unions brought about the NLRB, not the other way around,” says GlobalLogic Sub-Contractor Rachael Sawyer. “Our power was never in the law.”

To Continue Reading This Labor News Story, Go To: The Human Workforce Behind AI Wants a Union | The Nation

Graphic Courtesy Of linkedin.com.