YouTube Music workers say they were ‘laid off’ during Austin City Council meeting

Workers contracted with YouTube Music made headlines this weekend for saying they’d been laid off in the middle of an Austin City Council meeting.  

A clip of last Thursday’s city council meeting shows Jack Benedict, a member of the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU-CWA), appealing to the city council to pass a resolution in support of the workers.  

As he’s speaking, one of his coworkers, Katie Marschner, walks up and tells him: "Not to interrupt but they just laid us all off."  

Benedict takes a few moments for the information to sink in, telling the council: "I guess we just all got laid off." 

"Our jobs just ended today. Effective immediately. 

That’s when the council chimes in, telling Benedict that his time has expired but assures him that "we’ll follow up on this." 

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The AWU-CWA said Google informed workers on the YouTube Music team that they would be laid "hours before a scheduled vote by the Austin City Council on a resolution calling on Google to bargain with these same workers in good faith. 

AWU-CWA said these workers won their union election in April 2023, to which Google "publicly stated it would not engage in bargaining with them." 

"The [National Labor Relations Board] has ruled that Google’s continued refusal to bargain with these workers is unlawful," AWU-CWA said, adding: "The YouTube Music team is based out of Austin. Even as workers contribute to the success of the billion-dollar platform, they are paid as little as $19 dollars an hour and receive minimal benefits. Many workers are forced to work multiple jobs to make ends meet." 

Google and the subcontractor through which these workers were hired, Cognizant, have pushed back on the workers’ depiction of events. 

A spokesperson for the tech giant told FOX Business that these workers are contracted through Cognizant and are not Google employees. The company said last week was a routine end-of-contraction expiry and any suggestion to the contrary was false. 

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"Cognizant is responsible for these workers’ employment terms, including staffing," a spokesperson said. "As is the case here, contracts with our suppliers across the company routinely end on their natural expiry date, which was agreed to with Cognizant." 

A spokesman for Cognizant said the workers are still Cognizant employees and nobody was laid off.

"This contract ended at its planned expiration date," the spokesperson said. "Cognizant has an established process for connecting associates with new opportunities across our global organization when these changes arise." 

That the contract expired during the city council meeting was "purely coincidental," the spokesperson said, adding that the union members were actually "skipping a standing weekly meeting that was long on the calendar." 

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"It was at that standing meeting when employees were notified of the expired contract and they were notified how to set up for retraining and possible redeployment on another Cognizant project."