Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint
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Re: Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint
#2National Labor Relations Board, in case you're wondering. The author doesn't bother to define it until the 12th paragraph.
Re: Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint
#3> This is a marked departure from the way Google has handled employee dissent in the past. In 2018, more than 600 Google workers signed an open letter opposing Project Dragonfly, an effort to build a search engine for China. As The Verge reported at the time, the petition began with an internally shared Google Doc, and all subsequent steps were also organized using Google products. Employees also urged Google to drop Project Maven, its contract with the US Department of Defense. That same year, over 20,000 Google employees staged a walkout in protest of the company’s handling of sexual harassment allegations against executives. [...]
> “There’s been a total change in the way Google responds to employees trying to have a voice in their workplace,” the fired software engineer said. “It’s night and day from the Google of even five, 10 years ago.”
This is the most interesting part of the article for me. Google's approach today, versus how it reacted to the backlash against Maven in 2018, reflects a very different company with a different attitude toward the opinions of its employees.
Re: Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint
#4I’m assuming at will employment makes this very unlikely to be successful.
Re: Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint
#5[flagged]
Re: Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint
#6> This is a marked departure from the way Google has handled employee dissent in the past. In 2018, more than 600 Google workers signed an open letter opposing Project Dragonfly, an effort to build a search engine for China. As The Verge reported at the time, the petition began with an internally shared Google Doc, and all subsequent steps were also organized using Google products. Employees also urged Google to drop…
It doesn't actually say anything about how Google handled those employee demonstrations though... Were they less draconian?
Re: Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint
#7> This is a marked departure from the way Google has handled employee dissent in the past. In 2018, more than 600 Google workers signed an open letter opposing Project Dragonfly, an effort to build a search engine for China. As The Verge reported at the time, the petition began with an internally shared Google Doc, and all subsequent steps were also organized using Google products. Employees also urged Google to drop…
>> Google's approach today, versus how it reacted to the backlash against Maven in 2018, reflects a very different company with a different attitude toward the opinions of its employees
I guess that's one possibility. Another possibility is that the owners and board of Google have a very different attitude towards protests in favor of Palestinians than the owners and board of Google had towards other protests in the past.
Re: Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint
#8[flagged]
> where the most prominent voices support Hamas and what they did on Oct 7th
This is a pretty unsupportable take from where I'm standing. Maybe we are in separate bubbles, but very little of the stuff I've seen/read is _in support of_ Oct 7th. Vast majority of voices condemn the attacks, request immediate ceasefire and immediate return of hostages. I know that line so well because of how much I've heard it.
Re: Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint
#9The 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".
Re: Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint
#10[flagged]
> where the most prominent voices in the movement support Hamas
This is absolutely not true. This is a perception being spread by the media who don't like the attention being drawn towards the US' complicity in potential war crimes, but has no basis in reality. In reality many protesters themselves are Jewish.