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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

#331

Post by hrktb »

ramblerman wrote: post #300
helen___keller wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agreed with this at first, but according to her medium post ( https://medium.com/@ksspiers/google-fires-another-worker-for... ) "Part of my job was to write browser notifications so that my coworkers can be automatically notified of employee guidelines and company policies while they surf the web" If this is true and her job is literally to create javascript notifications of company policy, then I think it's entire…

Really? So if I hire you to email out my monthly company statement it’s reasonable that you add some of your own thoughts to said email.

It would be more like that employee emailing a company statement you didn’t want people to be aware of.

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

#332

Post by claudeganon »

School-Cotton wrote: post #210
objclxt wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't feel like my employer is a rival or an enemy; I feel like they are a partner in our mutual goal to make a lot of money [...] it's not hard to understand why many of us feel no draw to unions. It's hard for me to understand when you look at other similar industries. We're not talking about blue collar unions here: we're talking about white collar unions. They're very different. Take Hollywood as an example.…

Well, let me turn the question around. Imagine I was a generally happy mid-level software engineer, making $400k/yr at Google. How would a union help me?

By giving you greater control and direction over the nature of the company, the kind of work they do, and who they work with, to check executive power from engaging in short-sighted or immoral behavior, to provide you with an alternate route for addressing workplace discrimination or harassment, just to begin.

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

#333

Post by BoorishBears »

CharlesColeman wrote: post #324
BoorishBears wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of the popup isn't the issue I have with this. It's coopting an internal tool for political messages then implying "it passed PR" means you had permission from where it should come from. It's not even the message itself, I don't want politics, even those I agree with, living in the codebase I use at work. Sure the notice is required, but putting it so it shows up solely on the website for the legal firm hire…

> It's coopting an internal tool for political messages then implying "it passed PR" means you had permission from where it should come from. No one's saying it "passed PR", it passed the review process that was in place for similar changes. > IIRC, an employer has to make the content available in some form in a place where employees will see it, not just anywhere. Traditionally it's a wall display of posters in a ca…

You mean it passed the review process in place for "changing a few lines of code"?

Like a PR?

And I don't even get what the second half of your comment is trying to say, especially the cafeteria wall comment...

Putting an unannounced popup when you visit the page for a legal firm would not fulfill the requirement either, so what is your point?

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

#334

Post by space_fountain »

Touche wrote: post #303
Alex3917 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that 2 coworkers were fine with your change doesn't mean it was made in good-faith The standard for whether a company is legally allowed to fire an employee for organizing isn't whether their action is in "good faith", but whether their action is concerted. The fact that it passed code review is therefore critical evidence.

IANAL, but California is an at-will state. Again, IANAL, but my educated understanding is that you can fire someone for any reason as long as the reason is not illegal. Lastly, IANAL.

But IANAL firing some one for telling their co-workers about their right to unionize is an illegal reason to fire someone. I'm not completely convinced that's what happened here but still

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

#335

Post by mkolodny »

sbochins wrote: post #218
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…

Sounds like a code review—which you should all be familiar with. Adding something like that to a security tool requires more approvals than two engineers sitting next to you giving a green light.

Not necessarily. If it's your job to add notices to internal tools, and you've added notices to tools before without approval outside the engineers on your team, then I wouldn't expect someone to get more approval than that in this situation.

If I were Google, I'd give the employee a warning (one of three strikes). I'd tell them that they need approval from someone in a certain role (that's not an engineer) to post internal notices. Otherwise, it's up to the employee and their fellow engineers to make a judgement call about which notices are right to post.

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

#336

Post by KirinDave »

The irony of this is that Google's increasingly abusive behavior towards people talking about organization is that they're actually building a case for engineers to unionize to stop Google from these questionably legal firings.

If Google upper management had just shut up and kept the status quo and recognized that without impetus, comfortable workers almost certainly won't organize in America, then the unionization of Google would not be a national topic.

But here we are, with holdout reactionary bro's who ate the Ellison/Jobs/Schmidt wage-fixing cartel line about how evil unions were (even as they organized to oppress workers) in positions of power opening up the company (and thus the company's stock) to huge liability.

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

#337

Post by helen___keller »

C14L wrote: post #329
ramblerman wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? So if I hire you to email out my monthly company statement it’s reasonable that you add some of your own thoughts to said email.

Was she hired to only add things other people told her to add? Or was she hired to add things she considered relevant?

That's a good question, I don't know, but she claims the latter.

In her Medium post she claims that "Part of what makes me a great fit for Google is that the company is always telling us to take initiative to deliver high impact work." and also that she received stellar (4/5, 4/5, 5/5, where 5/5 is apparently top 2%) performance reviews, which reinforced her view that she should act on her judgment.

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

#338

Post by SauciestGNU »

Touche wrote: post #303
Alex3917 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that 2 coworkers were fine with your change doesn't mean it was made in good-faith The standard for whether a company is legally allowed to fire an employee for organizing isn't whether their action is in "good faith", but whether their action is concerted. The fact that it passed code review is therefore critical evidence.

IANAL, but California is an at-will state. Again, IANAL, but my educated understanding is that you can fire someone for any reason as long as the reason is not illegal. Lastly, IANAL.

Right, but retaliation for engaging in a concerted labor effort is specifically an illegal reason to fire someone.

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

#339

Post by [deleted] »

kop316 wrote: post #10

I think the relevant test is here: "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…

[deleted]

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

#340

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

ones_and_zeros wrote: post #262
dmix wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the message was "I baked cookies, come by my office if you'd like to try some" do you think this person would similarly be fired? A person that was recently promoted, was designated as a high performer, (and I have nothing to back this up but seemed strategically recruited since they did not fit the google mould as a high school drop out?) I think a reasonable reaction would be to remove the message from the exten…

> If the message was "I baked cookies, come by my office if you'd like to try some" do you think this person would similarly be fired?

No, but I think they'd similarly be fired if they had written an anti-union popup. (Indeed, if someone wrote an anti-union popup and weren't fired for it, I expect that would itself have made the news as a "Google hates unions" story.)

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