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Activists target Google conference

A COALITION of labour, housing and community activists protested at tech giant Google’s Developer's Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. 

The organisations reminded the tech giant that it was not living up to its "Don't Be Evil" corporate credo. 

The protest followed hard on the heels of another, separate, protest the day before in which Occupy Google activists calling for net neutrality turned up at Google's Mountain View headquarters in an action that led to 10 arrests.

Wednesday's protest was led by the Service Employees International Union, United Service Workers West (SEIU-USWW), which said it was calling on Google to give its security workers on a new contract. 

Protest organiser and SEIU-USWW representative Alfredo Fletes said that Google was "messing with security officers' lives" by giving them part-time hours without benefits and that, with limited hours in multiple locations, their $17 an hour pay simply wasn’t adequate.

“The workers are just fed up with scraping by and they’re coming together to demand a security contract that will support worker’s rights to collectively bargain,” Mr Fletes said. 

“We’re asking Google to step up and support good jobs.” 

The San Francisco Labour Council, and members of Eviction Free San Francisco, Jobs with Justice, San Francisco Rising and Senior and Disability Action will also took part in the demonstration.

Google lawyer Jack Halprin has been a particular target for the demonstrators since he bought an apartment building in San Francisco's Mission District two years ago and began evicting long-standing tenants.

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