Google workers just announced the formation of a union: the Alphabet Workers Union.

The union — named after Google’s parent company — is not the first at the trillion-dollar tech behemoth. Eighty contract workers at Google’s Pittsburgh office voted to unionize in 2019. That same year, more than two thousand cafeteria workers at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California did the same. Security guards at Google have been organized since 2017. But a union that includes white-collar workers who are directly employed by Google is new. Also new is the union’s wall-to-wall approach, encompassing temps, vendors, and contractors, or “TVCs,” alongside direct employees, a good strategy given that TVCs make up over half of Google’s workforce.

Tech companies like Google work hard to keep their companies union-free. I’ve previously written that hostility to unions is foundational to the industry — it was a major reason Silicon Valley became tech’s epicenter, rather than the East Coast. As Intel cofounder Robert Noyce once said, “remaining non-union is essential for survival for most of our companies.” Noyce died a long time ago, but many current tech companies’ only claim to innovation is in finding new ways to evade labor law. White-collar workers at crowdfunding site Kickstarter and the app developer Glitch recently unionized, but the Alphabet Workers Union is the first such effort to go public at one of the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) companies. As such, the announcement will trigger strong reactions in some boardrooms, regardless of what the union says or does.