4 ms·

The meat of it is here: > Google “retaliated against approximately 50 employees and interfered with their Section 7 rights by terminating and/or placing them o

The meat of it is here: > Google “retaliated against approximately 50 employees and interfered with their Section 7 rights by terminating and/or placing them on administrative leave in response to their protected concerted activity, namely, participation (or perceived participation) in a peaceful, non-disruptive protest that was directly and explicitly connected to their terms and conditions of work,” the complaint reads. Seems very thin to call on the NLRA here. The "protesters" stated goals were to disrupt work even for people not a member of the non-union (therefore not a strike) which is not a protected activity. Moreover, were any of these employees or any members of the minority union actually working on the Israeli contracts they objected to? While you can protest against your job duties under the NLRA (or job duties of your collective union members) I don't see that you can protest against company functions which aren't job duties you or your class aren't a part of. If the workers had just walked off the job and peacefully and non-disruptively protested in front of the building and refused to go back to their job until they (or other members of the minority union) had their job duties modified so they were not working on those projects and google had fired them, that seems like it would violate the NLRA. Anyway this seems like some fun FAFO. I wonder how many of the people who got fired were even members of the non-union before the "protest".

Simulacra 2y ago
It depends. Given the administrations position on such things right now, the NLRA could be used as a intimidation club against Google to settle.
davidf18 2y ago
[dead]
toast0 2y ago
I mean, go ahead and file a complaint, right? But my read of the situation while skimming the NLRB summary [1] is this complaint is unlikely to win > Strikes unlawful because of misconduct of strikers or other loss of protection. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a “sitdown” strike, when employees simply stay in the plant and refuse to work is not protected by the law. This feels pertinent, but not a whole match. > Furthermore, Section 8(b)(4) of the Act prohibits strikes for certain objects even though the objects are not necessarily unlawful if achieved by other means. An example of this would be a strike to compel Employer A to cease doing business with Employer B. It is not unlawful for Employer A voluntarily to stop doing business with Employer B, nor is it unlawful for a union merely to request that it do so. It is, however, unlawful for the union to strike with an object of forcing the employer to do so. These points will be covered in more detail in the explanation of Section 8(b)(4). In any event, employees who participate in an unlawful strike may be discharged and are not entitled to reinstatement. On the summary page, this looks like striking to prevent their employer from doing business with another employer (IDF) and might apply, but further reading seems to indicate this is about striking to not do business with a non-union employer, which isn't actually relevant. But either way, it's not clear to me that striking about who your employer does business with is a 'lawful' strike. [1] https://www.nlrb.gov/strikes https://www.nlrb.gov/strikes
- choppaface 2y ago
  The key difference here is that Google really wants the DoD contract and doesn’t care who’s on the losing side of the real battle. The Google Walkout in the wake of Andy Rubin, David Drummond etc was far more disruptive to their business yet Google on paper felt they got a great deal on the severance packages of Rubin and Drummond ($0). Or at least Sundar was proud of how he cleaned up those messes.
  - lupire 2y ago
    Rubin got $90M as a gift from Google, beyond what was negotiated.
- worried4future 2y ago
  I also don't think this counts as a strike, at least the actions taken do not fully fall within the protections of a strike even if they were striking for a reason for which strikes are permitted. Disruptive protest like what this was isn't a legal strike. Anyway I have no objection to them taking things to the NLRB, I just don't think they will win. I suspect google will settle by paying some or most of the terminated employees some severance or some other token gesture and will consider themselves lucky to be rid of activist employees.
gklitz 2y ago
[flagged]
racional 2y ago
This is a gross misreading of what the article actually said. The real meat the article (as reflected very clearly in its original title, not the mangled caption that was unfortunately used for the post; and throughout the article body itself) is that Google apparently fired some 20+ employees who either weren't involved the protest at all, or whose alleged participation remains unclear. As if the higher-ups got together and said to each other: "Ya know, 28 heads just isn't enough. We need to go out and bust some more, to you know, make a point. Plus there's that sound their skull makes when hitting the pavement. I just can't enough of it!" Google might dispute this - then again Google lies about a lot of things. We'll see how the complaint process goes. Either way you're going off on an ancilliary aspect of the article, not its main thrust.
- worried4future 2y ago
  > Google apparently fired some 20+ employees who either weren't involved the protest at all, or whose alleged participation remains unclear Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but there is deep information asymmetry here and google has all the advantage and must have anticipated that this would end up in discovery and litigation and that the records of the terminated people's employment would be subject to it. That means their chat history, their email history and office surveillance footage. I have a hard time believing that google would have fired people where the sum of their recorded actions couldn't be reasonably construed to be disruptive.
  - racional 2y ago
    I have a hard time believing that google would have fired people where the sum of their recorded actions couldn't be reasonably construed to be disruptive. From the article: “When I got there, there were probably 20-ish people sitting on the floor. I didn’t talk to any of them, I talked to folks who were standing up, passing out flyers, doing other roles,” he said, adding that the protesters were wearing matching T-shirts. The worker then went back to his desk before returning to the protest around 5PM. “I chatted with them for maybe four minutes, like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re still sitting here! How’s it going?’” he said. Then, he finished the workday from a nearby couch. The worker says he returned to Google the following day without incident. That night, while at dinner, he got an email from Google saying he had been terminated.

Simulacra 2y ago

It depends. Given the administrations position on such things right now, the NLRA could be used as a intimidation club against Google to settle.

davidf18 2y ago

[dead]

toast0 2y ago

I mean, go ahead and file a complaint, right? But my read of the situation while skimming the NLRB summary [1] is this complaint is unlikely to win > Strikes unlawful because of misconduct of strikers or other loss of protection. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a “sitdown” strike, when employees simply stay in the plant and refuse to work is not protected by the law. This feels pertinent, but not a whole match. > Furthermore, Section 8(b)(4) of the Act prohibits strikes for certain objects even though the objects are not necessarily unlawful if achieved by other means. An example of this would be a strike to compel Employer A to cease doing business with Employer B. It is not unlawful for Employer A voluntarily to stop doing business with Employer B, nor is it unlawful for a union merely to request that it do so. It is, however, unlawful for the union to strike with an object of forcing the employer to do so. These points will be covered in more detail in the explanation of Section 8(b)(4). In any event, employees who participate in an unlawful strike may be discharged and are not entitled to reinstatement. On the summary page, this looks like striking to prevent their employer from doing business with another employer (IDF) and might apply, but further reading seems to indicate this is about striking to not do business with a non-union employer, which isn't actually relevant. But either way, it's not clear to me that striking about who your employer does business with is a 'lawful' strike. [1] https://www.nlrb.gov/strikes https://www.nlrb.gov/strikes

choppaface 2y ago
The key difference here is that Google really wants the DoD contract and doesn’t care who’s on the losing side of the real battle. The Google Walkout in the wake of Andy Rubin, David Drummond etc was far more disruptive to their business yet Google on paper felt they got a great deal on the severance packages of Rubin and Drummond ($0). Or at least Sundar was proud of how he cleaned up those messes.
- lupire 2y ago
  Rubin got $90M as a gift from Google, beyond what was negotiated.
worried4future 2y ago
I also don't think this counts as a strike, at least the actions taken do not fully fall within the protections of a strike even if they were striking for a reason for which strikes are permitted. Disruptive protest like what this was isn't a legal strike. Anyway I have no objection to them taking things to the NLRB, I just don't think they will win. I suspect google will settle by paying some or most of the terminated employees some severance or some other token gesture and will consider themselves lucky to be rid of activist employees.

gklitz 2y ago

[flagged]

racional 2y ago

This is a gross misreading of what the article actually said. The real meat the article (as reflected very clearly in its original title, not the mangled caption that was unfortunately used for the post; and throughout the article body itself) is that Google apparently fired some 20+ employees who either weren't involved the protest at all, or whose alleged participation remains unclear. As if the higher-ups got together and said to each other: "Ya know, 28 heads just isn't enough. We need to go out and bust some more, to you know, make a point. Plus there's that sound their skull makes when hitting the pavement. I just can't enough of it!" Google might dispute this - then again Google lies about a lot of things. We'll see how the complaint process goes. Either way you're going off on an ancilliary aspect of the article, not its main thrust.

worried4future 2y ago
> Google apparently fired some 20+ employees who either weren't involved the protest at all, or whose alleged participation remains unclear Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but there is deep information asymmetry here and google has all the advantage and must have anticipated that this would end up in discovery and litigation and that the records of the terminated people's employment would be subject to it. That means their chat history, their email history and office surveillance footage. I have a hard time believing that google would have fired people where the sum of their recorded actions couldn't be reasonably construed to be disruptive.
- racional 2y ago
  I have a hard time believing that google would have fired people where the sum of their recorded actions couldn't be reasonably construed to be disruptive. From the article: “When I got there, there were probably 20-ish people sitting on the floor. I didn’t talk to any of them, I talked to folks who were standing up, passing out flyers, doing other roles,” he said, adding that the protesters were wearing matching T-shirts. The worker then went back to his desk before returning to the protest around 5PM. “I chatted with them for maybe four minutes, like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re still sitting here! How’s it going?’” he said. Then, he finished the workday from a nearby couch. The worker says he returned to Google the following day without incident. That night, while at dinner, he got an email from Google saying he had been terminated.