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

> This was an activist power-play. Every article that is written about this lists the action as activism. Again, why pretend otherwise?

When you use the words like activist and activism you evoke images of people pushing for new things that are politically decisive in some way.

The message she got fired over was expressed pretty settled interpretation of federal labor law that Google recently agreed to disseminate. It's like calling it an "activist power play" to remind the government of the First Amendment when if it tried to censor something or other. It's a stretch.

If anyone's being activist, it's the people who are trying to treat the expression of those rights as some kind of inappropriate activism.

> I also have yet to have anybody demonstrate that Google was breaking any federal law, and I highly doubt they would. They have entire departments that deal with legal complience.

Why do you "highly doubt" Google would break the law? In the past they've broken federal law in pretty obvious ways over labor practices.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...

They've also been forced to display the list of rights in question as part of a settlement with the NLRB:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/13/googles-settlement-on-speech...

Apparently that list is what the notification in question linked to.

> And you linked to a labour consulting company website, which I take is where this actvist decided to helpfully issue threats to senior management through the security tool she was tasked with maintaining so they think twice about contracting them.

I linked to a screenshot of the message we're actually discussing. You can see the so-called "threat" yourself:

> go/nlrbnotice Policy

> Do not violate go/nlrbnotice. Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.

> View Policy

> This is a such a clear violation on her part that I am flabbergasted that you would actually defend the move.

Black people sitting at lunch counters was once "such a clear violation" of corporate policy, too, but it was pretty defensible, no? Sometimes you have to take a broader view of something than whether it violated policy or not.

I'm not saying this action is fully equivalent to a lunch-counter sit-in, however I do think Google's reaction here was unsupportably harsh. The worst they should have done was issue a reprimand. I'm also "flabbergasted" by the over-the-top condemnation of this engineer's actions.

>When you use the words like activist and activism you evoke images of people pushing for new things that are politically decisive in some way.

Because that's what you are when you co-opt an internal tool to put up messaging over the web page of the consulting group that works with your employer. She knew what she was doing. She knew it was a political statement. She may even have even wanted to be martyred.

>The message she got fired over was expressed pretty settled interpretation of federal labor law.

She didn't get fired for her message even though you're trying to spin it that way. The medium matters here. You don't get to co-opt internal tools to post your interpretation of federal labor law, or to send a message to the management team, or whatever else her motivations were. That's why she got fired.

>What are you talking about? I linked to a screenshot of the message we're actually discussing. You can see the so called "threat" yourself:

I know exactly what she did. She made a political statement about a labour consulting group (that they can or do infringe on federal law) and that was directed at least partly at executive management (who else is going to work with IRI Consultants and browse their page). This was a purposeful activist power-play.

The gaslighting that you're engaging in is offputting. This kind of thing would have gotten her fired from pretty much every company in the country and for good reason - she's untrustworthy and cannot seperate her job as a Security Engineer from her activism, and I'm sorry you can't see that.

>Black people sitting at lunch counters was once "such a clear violation" of corporate policy, too, but it was pretty defensible, no?

She's not a black person during Jim Crow era. She's not oppressed, and it's offputing that you would even make that comparison. She's a bay-area engineer who was making a very good salary and betrayed the trust that her position entitled her to.

>I'm not saying this action is fully equivalent to a lunch-counter sit-in,

I hope not because that would be insane.

>The worst they should have done was issue a reprimand.

That's your opinion. I think she deserved termination. You don't want this kind of person on your security team. You cannot trust her to seperate activism from work.

And it is interesting that you can claim that she did nothing wrong, and at the same time understand why she should be reprimended.

> You don't get to co-opt internal tools to post your interpretation of federal labor law, or to send a message to the management team, or whatever else her motivations were. That's why she got fired.

> This kind of thing would have gotten her fired from pretty much every company in the country and for good reason - she's untrustworthy and cannot seperate her job as a Security Engineer from her activism, and I'm sorry you can't see that.

What Google-specific support do you have for this, than post-hoc rationalizations based on her firing? Every indication I've seen has told me that Google has developed a very unique corporate culture, which makes inferences from "every company in the country" suspect.

I can definitely see your position (which approximately seems to be: a worker's primary moral obligation is to serve his employers to their satisfaction during his employment. Assertion of his own rights on work time with work resources is a severe moral violation as it puts the workers' interest above the employers'.), I just disagree.

> She's not a black person during Jim Crow era. She's not oppressed, and it's offputing that you would even make that comparison. She's a bay-area engineer who was making a very good salary and betrayed the trust that her position entitled her to.

I'd say she is oppressed, just in a different, less-severe way than black people during the Jim Crow era.

> And it is interesting that you can claim that she did nothing wrong, and at the same time understand why she should be reprimended.

Really? I thought it was pretty widely understood that morality and law are not the same. You can have immoral things that are legal, and moral things that are illegal. Corporate policy is a weak kind of law that has even less claim to respect than federal and state law.

>What Google-specific support do you have for this, than post-hoc rationalizations based on her firing?

That's not post-hoc rationalization. That's the stated reason. That's also clearly the reason if you take an inventory of the facts on hand.

>Every indication I've seen has told me that Google has developed a very unique corporate culture

Yes, "unique" just like every snowflake is unique. And "Unique corporate culture" doesn't mean you can do whatever you want, as James Damore found out. And yes, her actions (not anybody elses) led to her termination, as would have been the case in every other company.

>I can definitely see your position (which approximately seems to be: a worker's primary moral obligation is to serve his employers to their satisfaction during his employment. Assertion of his own rights on work time with work resources is a severe moral violation as it puts the workers' interest above the employers'.)

That's not my position and I don't appreciate this distortion.

And no, she's not a moral arbiter of Google. She doesn't have the right to assert her interpretation of law and morality on the entire corporation. Maybe she thinks she was doing a moral action (though I would argue her action is narcissim and attention-seeking), but Google employs tens of thousands of people across the world, with different religions and politics and beliefs. You don't get to co-opt internal tools to advocate for Jesus Christ as your saviour (and what could be more moral than saving people from eternal damnation) just because you think that's the moral action.

>I'd say she is oppressed, just in a different, less-severe way than black people during the Jim Crow era.

Talk about an understatement of the century. She's as much oppressed as a grounded teenager, which, you're right, on the oppression scale is "less-severe way than black people during the Jim Crow era".

Her job was to notify people of company policy. Injecting messages based on her personal politics raises red flags. This time she sent a benign message, but what might she do when googlers ultimately don't unionize? What might she do the next time there's a policy she disagrees with?

Google has provided places for people to discuss things. When she didn't think that was good enough she chose to make unapproved code changes that went against corporate direction.

Personally, I'm against unionizing any software company, especially google. Unions were created to prevent systemic abuse of people that were seen as easily replaceable. If you think a recent college graduate making 120k+ that has been provided almost ridiculous perks and freedom unheard of in most of the industry is being abused when they could easily leave Google and expect to receive a similarly paid position virtually anywhere purely because they used to work at Google, then there's no helping you.

Google employees have more rights than at most companies, they can even spend up to 20% of their day working on personal projects and Google won't claim ownership. If they think they need a union when dealing with such a reasonable employer,then those fresh out of college lottery winners need a serious reality check. Let's talk about unionizing Amazon fulfillment centers where they frequently let people go because taking a bathroom break means missing your quota. Let's talk about unionizing virtually any company before we demand labor unions for the most highly privileged group of people in the world.