It's pretty unclear to me what "refusing to bargain" means in this context. It sounds like these are employees of a different company, trying to bargain with Google instead of their employer:
> "As we've said before, we have no objection to these Cognizant employees electing to form a union," Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini told The Register. "We simply believe it's only appropriate for Cognizant, as their employer, to engage in collective bargaining."
It details a similar situation with Accenture. Google's position makes sense here: Accenture and Cognizant set their employees pay, benefits, etc. So they should be the ones negotiating with the union. If I'm a forward deployed engineer and I want better pay, I don't negotiate with the customer I'm working with I negotiate with my boss.
Regardless, I don't think the union has much in the way of leverage here besides drumming up negative PR for Google. The Alphabet Workers Union apparently has ~1,400 members: https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/#:~:text=Our%20union%20....
Google has over 170,000 employees and ~120,000 contractors. Even if it were exclusive to employees, the Alphabet Workers Union accounts for less than 1% of Google's workforce.
> "As we've said before, we have no objection to these Cognizant employees electing to form a union," Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini told The Register. "We simply believe it's only appropriate for Cognizant, as their employer, to engage in collective bargaining."
It details a similar situation with Accenture. Google's position makes sense here: Accenture and Cognizant set their employees pay, benefits, etc. So they should be the ones negotiating with the union. If I'm a forward deployed engineer and I want better pay, I don't negotiate with the customer I'm working with I negotiate with my boss.
Regardless, I don't think the union has much in the way of leverage here besides drumming up negative PR for Google. The Alphabet Workers Union apparently has ~1,400 members: https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/#:~:text=Our%20union%20....
Google has over 170,000 employees and ~120,000 contractors. Even if it were exclusive to employees, the Alphabet Workers Union accounts for less than 1% of Google's workforce.