[worried4future]

The 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".

[toast0]

I mean, go ahead and file a complaint, right?

But my read of the situation while skimming the NLRB summary [1] is this complaint is unlikely to win

> Strikes unlawful because of misconduct of strikers or other loss of protection. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a “sitdown” strike, when employees simply stay in the plant and refuse to work is not protected by the law.

This feels pertinent, but not a whole match.

> Furthermore, Section 8(b)(4) of the Act prohibits strikes for certain objects even though the objects are not necessarily unlawful if achieved by other means. An example of this would be a strike to compel Employer A to cease doing business with Employer B. It is not unlawful for Employer A voluntarily to stop doing business with Employer B, nor is it unlawful for a union merely to request that it do so. It is, however, unlawful for the union to strike with an object of forcing the employer to do so. These points will be covered in more detail in the explanation of Section 8(b)(4). In any event, employees who participate in an unlawful strike may be discharged and are not entitled to reinstatement.

On the summary page, this looks like striking to prevent their employer from doing business with another employer (IDF) and might apply, but further reading seems to indicate this is about striking to not do business with a non-union employer, which isn't actually relevant. But either way, it's not clear to me that striking about who your employer does business with is a 'lawful' strike.

[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/strikes

[worried4future]

I also don't think this counts as a strike, at least the actions taken do not fully fall within the protections of a strike even if they were striking for a reason for which strikes are permitted. Disruptive protest like what this was isn't a legal strike.

Anyway I have no objection to them taking things to the NLRB, I just don't think they will win. I suspect google will settle by paying some or most of the terminated employees some severance or some other token gesture and will consider themselves lucky to be rid of activist employees.

[choppaface]

The key difference here is that Google really wants the DoD contract and doesn’t care who’s on the losing side of the real battle.

The Google Walkout in the wake of Andy Rubin, David Drummond etc was far more disruptive to their business yet Google on paper felt they got a great deal on the severance packages of Rubin and Drummond ($0). Or at least Sundar was proud of how he cleaned up those messes.

[lupire]

Rubin got $90M as a gift from Google, beyond what was negotiated.

[Simulacra]

It depends. Given the administrations position on such things right now, the NLRA could be used as a intimidation club against Google to settle.

[racional]

This is a gross misreading of what the article actually said.

The real meat the article (as reflected very clearly in its original title, not the mangled caption that was unfortunately used for the post; and throughout the article body itself) is that Google apparently fired some 20+ employees who either weren't involved the protest at all, or whose alleged participation remains unclear.

As if the higher-ups got together and said to each other: "Ya know, 28 heads just isn't enough. We need to go out and bust some more, to you know, make a point. Plus there's that sound their skull makes when hitting the pavement. I just can't enough of it!"

Google might dispute this - then again Google lies about a lot of things. We'll see how the complaint process goes.

Either way you're going off on an ancilliary aspect of the article, not its main thrust.

[worried4future]

> Google apparently fired some 20+ employees who either weren't involved the protest at all, or whose alleged participation remains unclear

Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but there is deep information asymmetry here and google has all the advantage and must have anticipated that this would end up in discovery and litigation and that the records of the terminated people's employment would be subject to it. That means their chat history, their email history and office surveillance footage.

I have a hard time believing that google would have fired people where the sum of their recorded actions couldn't be reasonably construed to be disruptive.

[racional]

I have a hard time believing that google would have fired people where the sum of their recorded actions couldn't be reasonably construed to be disruptive.

From the article:

“When I got there, there were probably 20-ish people sitting on the floor. I didn’t talk to any of them, I talked to folks who were standing up, passing out flyers, doing other roles,” he said, adding that the protesters were wearing matching T-shirts.

The worker then went back to his desk before returning to the protest around 5PM. “I chatted with them for maybe four minutes, like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re still sitting here! How’s it going?’” he said. Then, he finished the workday from a nearby couch. The worker says he returned to Google the following day without incident. That night, while at dinner, he got an email from Google saying he had been terminated.

[smsm42]

Maybe that what's happened. Or maybe this person forgot to mention some details about something else they did at that day, due to a random lapse of memory without doubt. The point is we have no way to know, based on the words of one, very non-disinterested, side.

[worried4future]

And, as I pointed out in my original comment, google has massive information asymmetry here.

They have video and email and message history and badge access times and maybe audio recording and maybe more, who knows.

So far we only have this one person's recollection of the events, where he has a huge bias towards trying to minimize his involvement.

[jimbob45]

I wish we had a HN equivalent for the HR crowd because I find situations like this fascinating. HR is going to have to come up with a policy for how coworkers interact with protesters without getting fired because some level of interaction is necessary. If someone is in your office, you're going to need a "Hey, what's going on?", "Can you move over a bit so I can sit at my desk?", and "So what are you guys protesting?". A blanket ban on all interaction won't work because guys like this will get canned but by the same token, you can't have people toeing the line going in and out and pretending to interact so they can stay in the area without having their jobs threatened.

[worried4future]

Nonsense.

If you read the original article it specifically says he sought out the protestors.

> he went to the lounge on the 10th floor of Google’s New York City office around lunchtime to check out the protest.

Is a single google cafeteria/lounge employee being terminated for happening to be in the lounge when the protest happened? Of course not because that would be nonsense.

[racional]

How is "checking out a protest" while on one's lunch break disruptive?

If you read the original article it specifically says he sought out the protestors

He was being "Googley" and curious, in other words. And got whacked for it.

From some random snippet attempting to define that nonsense term:

Googleyness is about embracing the unknown. Not just tolerating the unfamiliar, but really appreciating it. Celebrating finding yourself in a place you didn’t expect. Finding the joy in being surprised and dealing with unforeseen circumstances instead of resisting the reality you now occupy

[worried4future]

His commentary isn't the exonerating statement you seem to think it is.

By his own admission he sought to join the protestors (he went to the lounge on the 10th floor of Google’s New York City office around lunchtime to check out the protest) and spent an indeterminate amount of time talking with protestors the first time around (I talked to folks who were standing up, passing out flyers, doing other roles)

Anyway it doesn't matter if he spent 40 minutes talking to them, four hours talking to them or 4 minutes talking to them

[racional]

He sought to join the protestors

He went to "check out", and for a fraction of that time "talk with" the protestors, by the words you are quoting.

To "join the protestors" (implying some sort of direct participation) would of course be something entirely different, and in no way grounded in the description we have.

It doesn't matter 4 hours v. 4 min

An impartial observer of the situation would most likely strongly disagree with that take. In any case it certainly doesn't sound (from the description we have) that the net duration was anywhere near the former value. More likely it was around 20 min max.

So far we only have this one person's recollection of the events, where he has a huge bias towards trying to minimize his involvement.

Could be, who knows.

But from the weird semantic distortions you're attempting to lay over the words we do have from this guy -- it seems you're basically assuming he must be guilty of something awful, and therefore to be lying in some major way, also.

[worried4future]

> assuming he must be guilty of something awful

He is. He is guilty of doing something his employer didn't like and they fired him for it.

[6510]

Reminds me of the Chinese social credit system. Having an opinion is terrible, talking with someone who has an opinion is arguably worse! That is how the disease spreads! The signal is that you should cover your ears and run away.

[smsm42]

> who either weren't involved the protest at all,

Or at least they say that. Which may or may not be true. Maybe google is lying, maybe they are lying. I imagine if NLRB asks, Google will be willing to provide the grounds for firing and we'd know who is the liar here.