This week protests were held on both US coasts by Google employees seeking to draw attention to thousands of co-workers who were laid off recently, as well as to protest labor conditions for subcontracted workers.

The rallies were held at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, and near Google’s corporate offices in New York City. They followed the company’s announcement of the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history, in which it cut 6% of its global workforce, eliminating 12,000 jobs. Google was just the latest of many other tech firms like Microsoft Corp, Salesforce Inc, and Amazon Inc, which announced workforce cuts heading into the present economic environment.

The New York protest drew about 50 employees at a Google store on Ninth Avenue. It began almost immediately after the company released its fourth quarter earnings report, which showed the company had made $13.6 billion in profits.

Alberta Devor, a software engineer at the tech firm said, “Today, Google has debunked its own rationale for laying off 12,000 of our co-workers. It is clear that the menial savings the company is pocketing from laying off workers is nothing in comparison to the billions spent on stock buybacks or the billions made in profit last quarter.”

The demonstrations were organized by a “minority union” called Alphabet Workers Union, which lacks collective bargaining rights, and whose members are a mixture of Google employees and subcontractors.,

In an interview AWU member Devor said, “Today shows that some of the issues we’re talking about affect all workers regardless of what their actual job title or job status is.”

On Wednesday, dozens of subcontractors rallied outside of Google’s headquarters in California to protest what they called substandard conditions, including “poverty wages and no benefits.” Their assigned duties include reviewing content so as to help train the firm’s AI algorithms, as well as policing the site’s content and ads for offensive materials. However they say their pay and benefits fall far below Google’s minimum standards for benefits which are applied to its direct contract workers.

Zai Snell, a subcontractor who attended the  California protest, said, “We would like to at least be able to have some chance of survivability with this job.”