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One of the speakers at a union press conference on Google’s campus in July told the story of a colleague who brought a four-year-old to take-your-child-to-work day. That same day, the colleague found out the job was gone. Another speaker talked about layoffs that had cost people their visa sponsorship and put their right to stay in the country at risk, KQED reported. The Alphabet Workers Union had come to the Mountain View campus that Thursday to hand over a petition.
Around nine that morning, a small group of workers carried the petition to the offices of Google Cloud’s chief executive and two senior vice presidents, Business Insider reported. None of the three was in, and the workers slid copies under their doors. At the office of Sundar Pichai, who runs Google and its parent company, Alphabet, someone on his team promised to pass it on.
At noon, nearly a hundred workers gathered on a stretch of lawn, many in matching black shirts, some unrolling a white banner that listed more than 4,500 signers. Parul Koul, a software engineer at Google and president of the Alphabet Workers Union, told the crowd what they’d come to ask for.
The petition asks for four things. Anyone Google lays off would get at least the severance it paid in January 2023, and Google would offer voluntary exit packages, as written policy, before forcing anyone out. People could take that severance as a stretch of paid leave, which for someone on a work visa can mean keeping their health coverage and their immigration status while they look for the next job. And it asks Google to stop grading employees on a curve, where each rating can only go to a set share of people.
At the press conference, Koul said the campaign goes back to January 2023, when Google laid off 12,000 people. She said management had explained every round of cuts since as a hard call brought on by the economy. Thursday’s delivery was the union’s second try. Koul told Business Insider that a first attempt to get the petition to Pichai last year got no real answer. She said this one had more than twice as many names.
“I see worried people, grateful to still have a job, do the best they can to keep it,” Nobel Barakat, another software engineer at Google, said at the protest, according to Business Insider. Google didn’t respond to the reporters who asked.
Where the quarter’s cash went
Alphabet reported its second quarter on July 22, with revenue up 24 percent. Near the end of the release, Alphabet adds a small table of its own. It starts with cash from operations, what was left once the day-to-day bills were paid: $39,069 million. From that it takes off purchases of property and equipment, mostly servers and the buildings they sit in: $44,924 million. That’s twice what Alphabet spent on them in the same quarter a year earlier. The difference is free cash flow, and for the quarter it was minus $5,855 million. On the call, Anat Ashkenazi, the finance chief, raised what Alphabet expects to spend on property and equipment this year. She said the main reason was capacity coming in faster, to keep up with demand, CNBC reported.
Profit looks nothing like that, for two reasons. Most of the quarter’s profit was a paper gain on shares Alphabet holds in other companies: mainly SpaceX, which went public in June, and a private company the filing doesn’t name. And a server bought in June hits the cash statement in June but reaches profit a piece at a time, as depreciation, over the years it’s in use. In the quarter, depreciation came to about one dollar for every six Alphabet spent on property and equipment.
Spending like that is easy to mistake for a loss. My own model once read Amazon that way, and I wrote it up. The table stops at that spending, so the cash Alphabet pays on its employees’ stock awards isn’t in it.
Where this breaks
Free cash flow is a number Alphabet works out for itself. No accounting rule says what goes into it, and Amazon once put out three versions for the same year. For the last twelve months, the same table shows a positive $53,273 million, though each of the last two quarters came in well below the one before. The minus figure also understates the spending. Alphabet had more unpaid bills for servers and buildings at the end of June than at the end of March, so it built more in the quarter than it paid for.
The profit side leans on an estimate too. Alphabet depreciates its servers over about six years, a period it picks, and its 10-Q says new technology could change it. Whether all those servers pay for themselves is still open. Ashkenazi told analysts that demand was still running ahead of what Alphabet could supply. The 10-Q backs part of that with signed Google Cloud contracts not yet booked as revenue. Alphabet started counting that figure differently this year.
The shares Koul’s coworkers are paid in
Koul’s coworkers get part of their pay in Alphabet stock. When the shares vest, Alphabet keeps back enough of them to cover the tax and pays that tax in cash on their behalf. That cash shows up in the financing section, next to everything else Alphabet raised and paid out that quarter, and the filing doesn’t say which money paid for what. Alphabet started the quarter with $126,840 million in cash and securities. It added $21,071 million of debt, net of what it paid back, and took in $49.6 billion from new stock in June, which it said would help pay for its AI infrastructure. It spent nothing on buybacks in the first half of the year, after $28,306 million in the first half of 2025.
In the second quarter, Alphabet’s payments on its employees’ stock awards, mostly that tax, came to $6,573 million. That’s more than twice the dividend, which was $2,689 million. The board set that dividend in April, and it went out on June 15. Those payments have been bigger than the dividend every year since Alphabet started paying one, in 2024. In June, Alphabet set up a program to put new shares on the market over time. It’s there mainly to cover those taxes, the 10-Q says. When it announced the program, Alphabet said it plans to issue as many new shares as it takes to cover them. Alphabet expects about $30 billion of those sales to go to this year’s tax on its employees’ stock.