Some of the Bay Area’s knowledge workers — historically hard to organize — are embracing unions.

It was remarkable when several hundred workers from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced the formation of a union.

Cafeteria workers, security guards and bus drivers serving tech companies have unionized. But a tech company’s rank and file organizing itself was rare in the industry’s heartland.

To ward off unions, companies offered competitive pay and benefits, even to early workers assembling chips and devices on factory floors. “That was the trade-off,” O’Mara said. It was an approach that gave workers a shared stake in a company’s success.

Such practices have been largely effective in preventing large-scale unionization in the skilled tech workforce.

The new group at Alphabet, called the Alphabet Workers Union and affiliated with the Communication Workers of America, is a different sort of union. While most workers band together to demand better pay and working conditions, the Alphabet union instead seeks to organize workers around issues from fighting gender-based and racial discrimination to policing the ways they see the company as straying from its original “Don’t be evil” slogan.

Because the Alphabet Workers Union is a so-called “minority union” — only a few hundred Alphabet workers have signed on — it does not have the power to negotiate a contract. For now, workers hope to organize across the company to bring the culture of the company more in line with their values.

With increasing dissatisfaction among big tech’s workforce, the Alphabet union suggests the unrest may be entering a new phase. “With each unionization in tech, the power shifts,” said CWA communications director Beth Allen.