this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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Good question. I wasn't. I was not located in California, and the union never really came up in any of my conversations with colleagues. I vaguely thought dues were 5-8% of total compensation (I see now they are 1% which seems reasonable, either I am misremembering or they have since lowered, or maybe I looked at a different union) and they did not have any negotiating rights. Admittedly, if the union isn't negotiating then I don't know what it is for. But maybe it just needed to get to critical mass to have that negotiating leverage and I could have helped by joining. My total compensation was very good though, so it didn't really seem like something a union had to protect. I had excellent work-life balance, good benefits, etc.
Edit: Internally, Googlers are fairly transparent. There were multiple anonymous surveys run by employees for collecting compensation statistics broken down by gender, role, region, office, etc. It had a pretty high number of participants. That was very informative and I always participated.
No union in the world asks rates that high. You've been probably have been served some kind of management union busting material if you have ever seen a number that high. 3% is considered very high already.
Anyway AWU is not necessarily trying to bargain for higher wages, but they do work on better job security, better working environments, fairness against abuses, sexual harassment and similar stuff, and obviously they support the political work of anti-genocide groups within Google.
There's always a reason to join a union if you're a worker.