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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

#181

Post by claudeganon »

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #172
claudeganon wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not compared to business interests and certainly nowhere near comparable to their political force in European democracies where sector wide bargaining isn’t banned.

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

#182

Post by javajosh »

jefftk wrote: post #110
Maxion wrote: post #20

Did no one read the article? > Spiers, 21, said she went through the standard approval process, which requires two co-workers to greenlight changes, before updating the Chrome browser extension. Another source at Google familiar with the update approval process confirmed to NBC news that those two approvals are standard practice for a browser extension update. She did it exactly according to internal policy. The exte…

> She did it exactly according to internal policy. I don't think this person or the other organizers should have been fired, but code review is not the same as organizational approval. (Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)

What is the purview of a code review? Is it only about making sure the code meets technical standards, or are reviewers expected to comment holistically?

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

#183

Post by panpanna »

felideon wrote: post #100

Spiers' account of what happened: https://medium.com/@ksspiers/google-fires-another-worker-for...

Thanks for the link. This section caught my attention:

> I was interrogated about separate other organizing activities, and asked (eight times) if I had an intention to disrupt the workplace. The interrogations were extremely aggressive and illegal. They wouldn’t let me consult with anyone, including a lawyer, and relentlessly pressured me to incriminate myself and any coworkers

Sounds more foxconn than Google to me...

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

#184

Post by xxpor »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #82
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?

> Why would any sane person be against unions? I have no horse in this race. But as a counterpoint, pretty much everything in New York is more expensive due to heavy unionisation, particularly around construction and public services.

There's a lot of other reasons stuff is expensive in NY. Europe is heavily unionized and somehow they still manage to build subways at a lot less than $1 billion per mile.

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

#185

Post by iandanforth »

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…

This isn't how extension development works? The APIs for calling the notify methods already exist. Depending on how their tools work the diff could have been

1. A list of one website on which to notify

2. The static content to display on that website in a predefined (provided by the browser) popup context.

While I grant what you're saying is possible given the dev's access rights, it's not required for the functionality described in the article.

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

#186

Post by shantly »

> IRI Consultants — the Troy, Michigan, firm that Google hired this year amid a groundswell of labor activism at the company

Anyone know the likely reasons your average Googler might have visited this consulting firm's site? Like, was Google sending employees to it for some reason (why?), or would it have just been by chance or because they read Google hired them in the news and wanted to see what they were up to?

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

#187

Post by zozbot234 »

dmix wrote: post #155
evrydayhustling wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone else who didn't get that far the first time: > Spiers' pop-up message was inserted into a tool that notifies employees of privacy and security concerns about using non-Google tools and services, like warning employees not to upload proprietary information to Dropbox, Spiers said. The tool is managed by the platform security team, for which Spiers worked for almost two years as a security engineer. So, seem…

Exactly what does union activism have to do with security and privacy of potentially dangerous websites? I’m surprised how many people are jumping through hoops to defend this sort of thing.

That extension is not limited to privacy and security concerns. One of the sites the extension warns about is Dropbox, and few people would seriously describe Dropbox as inherently insecure or as violating privacy. What is true is that some interactions with Dropbox may be in breach of other existing policies that Googlers must follow, such as wrt. proprietary information and the like. Googlers are also required not to violate labor law.

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

#188

Post by seriesf »

Waterluvian wrote: post #52

The method in which she tried to notify co-workers is the real headline to me. It tells me that they really struggle to be able to communicate broadly with co-workers.

But that’s so untrue. Google internally has a number of different platforms with universal reach.

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

kop316 wrote: post #75
danso wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but could you clarify what you would be fired for in your hypothetical situation? Presumably, it's not automatically against company policy to expense a trip to Hawaii.

I was implying I took the trip to vacation, not to do work. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by scarface74 »

danso wrote: post #174
scarface74 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Taping it to your wall is acceptable. Posting it to my computer screen isn’t.
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