The Alphabet Workers Union wants guaranteed severance and buyouts offered in every product area before any mandatory cuts.

The petition gathered more than 4,500 signatures, and workers carried it to the office of chief executive Sundar Pichai last Thursday.

The petition asks Google to guarantee severance for anyone caught in a round of cuts, to put buyouts on the table before any mandatory layoffs in any product area, and to let staff take that severance as prolonged paid leave. Separately from the petition, union members want the company to scrap its performance ratings, which they say reward the meeting of targets rather than genuine merit.

Speaking outside Google's California headquarters, union president Parul Koul, a software engineer at the company, cited its $4 trillion valuation, a figure she said had quadrupled over the past six years. The cuts, she argued, are not hard calls at all, but profit placed above the people who keep the company running.

Dan Freedman, a Google software engineer and union member who builds AI tools for designers, used the press conference to voice worries about his own position. Once AI became part of what his role required, he said, he worried both that he was not making enough use of it and that it might take his place — and he cannot help asking himself whether he will be the next to go.

The union has already brought together hundreds of Google employees around the country over these concerns, Koul said, and management chose to ignore them. That is why the workers turned up in person. The petition extends a continuing union campaign that has so far won voluntary departure packages for more than 70,000 staff.

Google has been shrinking its workforce in recent months while raising its AI budget. On Alphabet's most recent earnings call, the chief financial officer described AI as a key investment priority, with plans to keep hiring and to put more marketing support behind it. The company made no comment on whether AI had played any part in its job cuts. The petition arrives amid a wider wave of tech industry workforce reductions, some of which companies have explicitly attributed to AI. The head of DeepMind, Google's AI unit, has said separately, in a general remark not addressed to Google's job cuts, that firms seeking to swap developers out for AI show a lack of imagination.

On the day, Koul said, the workers were largely met with closed doors and no response, and they left the petition with a member of staff in Pichai's office who undertook to pass it on.