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Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

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Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#171

Post by CharlesColeman »

idlewords wrote: post #167
Miner49er wrote: post #26

I'm not a lawyer, but on the surface this seems clearly illegal on Google's part based on the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Does anyone know of any similar cases to this? EDIT: Found one in Purple Communications . It was ruled workers can use work email to organize. https://www.littler.com/nlrb-creates-right-use-corporate-e-m...

It's significant that she did this on her own. You need multiple people for protected concerted activity.

It sounds like she went through a code review process for the change, would that count?

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#172

Post by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 »

claudeganon wrote: post #105
Maxion wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like a lot of astro-turfing going on here. Why would any sane person be against unions?

Literal decades of highly-funded propaganda by business interests to manufacture this consensus, for starters, Taft-Hartley banning sector-wide bargaining to render unionizing as company-level adversarialism vs. a broader fight for worker security and rights, the purging of leftists from the labor movement with Red Scare postwar...

Unions are are one of the largest political forces in a lot of areas.

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#173

Post by dahdum »

GVIrish wrote: post #106
mytailorisrich wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spiers, 21, said she went through the standard approval process, which requires two co-workers to greenlight changes, before updating the Chrome browser extension That sounds like code review approvals, not actual project/management approval of the 'feature'. We have the same: Cannot commit any code change unless 2 other team members have reviewed it. That has nothing to do with having actual project/management app…

I'd agree, it sounds a lot like a code review, but at Google that was also the approval standard for deploying such an extension. I don't really see how Google could be in the right here though. If they have an internal program for creating alerts/extensions for specific websites, and Spiers followed the normal procedure for adding such an extension, there doesn't seem to be a problem. The only problem is Google bein…

The tool was for privacy and security, not advocacy right? Sounds like she abused her position as a security engineer.

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#174

Post by danso »

scarface74 wrote: post #158
pr0zac wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well no, but considering that she seems to have followed the correct processes if she had done that I'd have expected the response to be rolling back the commit and a follow up postmortem to document what was missing from the process that allowed it to happen and changes made to the process to prevent it from happening in the future. Not firing the employee. You shouldn't blame workers for system failures.

What if your manager told you it was okay to post “Make America Great Again” or “Hope” (Obama’s slogan) slogans on everyone’s desk because he was staunch Republican/Democrat - would you just shrug and say “my manager said it was okay”?

Again, labor/union messaging has protections that political campaigning does not. If you were a manager and you told your employee to throw away the pro-union pamphlet that you taped to your cubicle wall, your manager would be putting the company in legal trouble.

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#175

Post by dmix »

idlewords wrote: post #167
Miner49er wrote: post #26

I'm not a lawyer, but on the surface this seems clearly illegal on Google's part based on the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Does anyone know of any similar cases to this? EDIT: Found one in Purple Communications . It was ruled workers can use work email to organize. https://www.littler.com/nlrb-creates-right-use-corporate-e-m...

It's significant that she did this on her own. You need multiple people for protected concerted activity.

People are acting like higher ups essentially approved this because of a code review process.

The logical leaps people are willing to take because they think the ends justify the means is interesting.

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#176

Post by gbronner »

TravHatesMe wrote: post #135
Touche wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still worth discussing if their reaction warranted the offense. Would they have fired her had she added a pop-up on Earth Day encouraging employees to recycle? Or would she have received a slap on the wrist for that. In other words, how much of what she was advocating was part of the decision to fire?

That is a good question. Is this a fireable offense regardless of the content? If not, what kind of content is fireable, subject matter that is political, religious, vulgar, or offensive? Putting this into an internal tool does seem unprofessional in my opinion. Why bite the hand that feeds you?

I assume that she was an at-will employee, and this does not fall under the rubric of 'protected activities', so they can fire her for any activity.

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#178

Post by scarface74 »

danso wrote: post #166
scarface74 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does what she did even pass the sniff test? What if she got permission from her supervisor to inject $political_message_you_dont_agree_with in your browser. Would you be okay with that?

A pro-union statement may be a "political message", but it is also content that has special protections in labor law. As the article says, as part of a legal settlement over alleged labor violations, Google is required to print out and post a statement of employee rights [0] that begins, "FEDERAL LAW GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO: Form, join, or assist a union;...Act together with other employees for your benefit and protec…

Print out and post is not the same thing as injecting JS in the browser. Was she part of the legal or compliance team?

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#179

Post by extropy »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #107
cj wrote: post #5

> Kathryn Spiers, who worked as a security engineer, updated an internal Chrome browser extension so that each time Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants — the Troy, Michigan, firm that Google hired this year amid a groundswell of labor activism at the company — they would see a pop-up message that read: “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.” So basically, the Go…

> injecting javascript into an employer's internal chrome extension The purpose of the extension is to serve site-specific pop-ups. Spiers added a pop-up to an existing pop-up tool using existing, precedented processes. The analogy to a poster in a cafeteria, which is explicitly protected by federal law, passes a first-order smell test.

These popups are security popups, the ones you would get from your antivirus/firewall and carry a certain Management endorsement weight.

It's not a free for all space to put random messages into.

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#180

Post by elisharobinson »

impalallama wrote: post #111
Touche wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prefixing this by saying I am not siding with Google (since people make assumptions). The standard approval process sounds like most merge review processes on any engineering team. There's a sort of assumed good-faith for this process. The fact that 2 coworkers were fine with your change doesn't mean it was made in good-faith and was within the bounds of normal types of changes. Any engineer with the freedom to make…

Yeah let's be real, if she programmed a popup to appear over twitter with a message like "Don't slack off dummy UwU" and or something equally ill informed she would have been rebuked at worst. To say that it wasn't the union overtones that got her fired is naive.

from an outsider perspective i can say that to me This is a security tool and it should show popup for restricted sites and/or flagged sites. if its intent was a general notification extension like office emails etc , nobody would have cared. But since it is a security tool even if your action is not malicious the expectation of security only updates is breached, which is what i believe is the core issue. More so the employee is a security engineer, the fact that this is most likely something they would be aware of and proceeded to do this change anyway is something which is extreme-ly worrying. It raises all sorts of questions like how safe is google infrastructure from rouge employees and how does this affect data collected by google and handled by googlers.
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