Workers Unions

Twitch ran advertisements by its parent company Amazon on the live streaming platform that were advocating for Amazon workers to not unionize. Following criticism on social media, the advertisements have been removed and a Twitch spokesperson has stated that the advertisements "should never have been allowed to run" on Twitch as political advertisements are against the internal policies.

Employees at an Amazon logistics center in the U.S. state of Alabama want to organize themselves into a union - voting on the matter began there by mail ballot on Monday. At stake is the online retailer's Bessemer branch with about 5,800 employees, and the vote is expected to last until the end of March. If the vote is positive, it would be the first Amazon site ever to be represented by a union.

Over 200 employees of Google and its parent firm Alphabet have formed Alphabet Workers Union amid increasing disagreements with the company’s senior executives, including the handling of sexual misconduct by former executives, Google's partnership with the Pentagon and the controversial departure of AI researcher Timnnit Gebru.

"We hope to create a democratic process for workers to wield decision-making power; promote social, economic, and environmental justice; and end the unfair disparities between TVCs (temporary, vendors and contractors) and FTEs (full time employees)," the union's website said.

In an internal presentation that showed new features for Facebook's own productivity tool Workplace, the company presented a feature that helps employers control the content on the platform through blacklisting words. In the presentation "unionize" was used as an example, which sparked a backlash from Facebook employees leading to the presentation being taken down from the internal platform a day later. Karandeep Anand, a product manager for Facebook Workplace has apologized for using "unionize" as an example claiming that Facebook has no intention of "censoring users".