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by dataduck 2404 days ago
There has been quite a lot of noise on HN about this, and many of the other posts have disappeared, perhaps in an attempt to stop the whole front page getting swamped by this story.

You can find the other links here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...

I wouldn't normally bother, but the medium article is about the least balanced of the lot. As far as I can tell, the protesters weren't fired for unionizing, in fact they never attempted to push for better pay or conditions; they were fired for harassing other employees in order to further private political agendas. This changes the story somewhat.

3 comments

Private political agendas? Who are they, the oxymoron party?
That's funny. ...but I believe the notion is that it was a political agenda not shared by the company or the employee's peers.
It’s a violation of the NLRA to fire employees for organizing, so it makes a lot of sense that the reasons given for their termination would be something other than “you’re fired for unionizing”. I’ve read the other articles linked in this thread and there’s not much by way of evidence on either side besides Google’s statements but it’s naive to think that the company would outright say that they were violating federal labor laws even if they were.
How did you reach this conclusion?
Reading the other articles.
Care to tell us which articles?
Have you even searched for them?

Took me 30 seconds to find this on a mobile phone while commuting to work:

Four Google Employees fired for violating co-worker's data privacy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21635286

Top-level comment has a link with a list of articles.

The article in the linked post says nothing beyond repeating an obvious corporate soundbite and there is no list of articles in the comments. What list are you referring to?
Read again. I said "link with a list of articles". Try clicking the link.

And the linked article clearly states why they were fired:

"The latest development occurred Monday when Google (GOOG) sent an email to all staff members describing its decision to fire four employees for allegedly violating its data-security policies. Google confirmed the contents of the email titled "Securing our data," which was first obtained and reported on by Bloomberg. The email described some of the actions allegedly taken by the fired employees, including accessing other employees' calendars and sharing information about their whereabouts with outside sources. It was sent out on behalf of Google's Security and Investigations Team."