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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

Hey guys, at the expense of sounding stupid, please educate me - if a company A pays you a salary X to do your fucking job Y and if you use that money and time on activities Z, especially if it negatively affects company A's image / revenues, why shouldn't the company be allowed to fire you as they're losing significant revenues because you didn't fulfil your contractual obligation to perform Y that you're paid X for?

I'm not taking sides nor talking about what's right, what's wrong, or whether you agree with the company's way of handing something or not. I'm talking simply from a contractual standpoint that you signed on the day of your employment.

If you don't like it, why don't you just quit and then sue the company instead?

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Because the company is actually made up of the people that work for it, it’s not the shareholders/owners keeping the company alive and giving it “personhood” status, it’s the employees. So it only seems natural that when some of the employees think that something is “wrong” with said company that they’d want to take the necessary steps to fix said wrong thing (with varied degrees of success). Google without its employees is nothing, the same as Facebook or Microsoft without their employees are nothing.

I think this just isn’t true and a corporation gets it’s legal status from an act of incorporation, and not from having employees. But on the other hand I’m not a lawyer so maybe I’ve been wrong about this my entire life.

On the other hand there are reasons an employer may want or be required to allow this behaviour that have little to do with what a corporation is

Yeah, I know the de jure way of how a corporation is defined, but it is my understanding that de facto things have started to change, especially for the companies I mentioned above for which the fixed capital they posses (servers, HQ buildings and not that much else) is dwarfed by the value of their human capital.

de facto has not changed except in your bubble of friends.

I have no friends that work in SV, but from half a world away I did notice that almost a one trillion dollar company (Alphabet) recently decided to remain out of a very lucrative market (web search in China) mostly because of the pressure coming from some of its employees. From what I've read similar moves have happened at Microsoft (with less degree of success related to its DoD contracts). I'm pretty sure this was not a fact of life back in the days when industrial conglomerates were ruling the Western industrial world.

Google "fiduciary duty"

The problem is that the "something" that is "wrong" is wrongthing.

Extending the example, “if a company A (eg. Marlboro) pays you a salary X to do your fucking job Y ( make cigarettes more addictive) and if you use that money and time on activities Z(whistleblowing, protesting, etc), especially if it negatively affects company A's image / revenues, why shouldn't the company be allowed to fire

I think people feel strongly about certain issues. That doesn’t imply that what they are doing is inherently wrong if driven by those core sentiments. How about we empathize- We can respect both Google’s and the employees’ action without choosing sides.

I mean, if you have moral objections, quit. It's not like Google engineers, of all people, are otherwise unemployable.

What I don't understand is to complain about or refuse to do things you morally object to and at the same time insist in keeping collecting a nice paycheck. You can't have both.

>What I don't understand is to complain about or refuse to do things you morally object to and at the same time insist in keeping collecting a nice paycheck. You can't have both.

Yes, of course you can have both. Companies can and have been improved in their behaviour by employee protests, strikes, union bargaining, and other such measures.

Historically hasn't this activism always been about improving working conditions?

I was empathetic with the initial walkout since it was addressing working conditions directly (covering up sexual harassment and forced arbitration).

Then the organizers of that action started agitating to change company direction regarding military contracts, censored search engines, and conservative people being on certain boards. While in general I have reservations about all those things, and think people should speak up about them, I don't think that organizing against general company direction should be protected in the same way labor organizing is.

If you have moral objections but still believe that the company can address them, why would you quit rather than try to change things from within?

By all means, try to change things from within, but keep it within. The moment you start leaking internal stuff, betraying the trust of your employer and your peers, you turn it into an us-vs-them situation, and I don't find it surprising that you end up suffering us-vs-them consequences.

At the same time, if your moral objections are strong enough, you should quit immediately. E.g. if your company says good news, everyone! We're opening concentration camps tomorrow!, I suppose the only reasonable action is to quit in disgust (as I said before, it's not like Google engineers are otherwise unemployable). If you stick around you're implicitly saying that your moral objections aren't that strong (at least not as strong as your desire to get a fat juicy paycheck), and sure, try to change from within, but keep it private and keep it civil, without biting the hand that is feeding you.

Exactly. And if you have moral objections to how a country is run, leave. Don’t try to change it.

Can't tell whether you're being ironic or not, but that's exactly why I left my home country, and two other countries I used to live in.

I hope he is being ironic. Because it's not always possible to change companies for people, let alone entire countries.

Everyone has to pick their battles. Sometimes they believe that it's not possible or practical to affect any meaningful amount of change. I can imagine trying to change an entire country as an individual can certainly feel that way. But sometimes people derive a great deal of meaning by fighting for things they believe in. And sometimes they win. I wouldn't be so quick to discount this impulse in people.

Not sure if you are being facetious. I am yet to work at a for-profit company which is run like a democracy.

The problem with that approach is much as I think the politicians in the countries I have lived in are incompetent and corrupt, it is still significantly less corrupt that most of the countries in the world.

Thankfully Google is not (yet?) a nation, so this analogy is facile to the point of absurdity.

It wields a heck of a lot more power than many countries on Earth. It's not that fatuous.

only it is economic power, contrary to the power of governments to apply any physical force necessary to make you comply with any rules it imposes on you.

But this sophistry of comparing Marlbro to Google is tiring. While at it, why not just compare things to 1943 Germany?

I say this as an ardent critic of Google: An individual finding irreconcilable differences with a bona fide good employer like Google is unlikely to find any other company fault-free. Tsk tsk: The issue is likely not with the companies.

(make cigarettes more addictive) strawman here. You can be hired to do the opposite of addictive.

Because part of the contract you mention involves adhering to employment law, which generally says that companies cannot fire people for union activity.

Can you attach a source?

Edit: Why are people downvoting me for asking for a source?

https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employers/d...

The NLRB also supports neya's point; companies can prohibit union organizing activites that interfere with work.

> Working time is for work, so your employer may maintain and enforce non-discriminatory rules limiting solicitation and distribution, except that your employer cannot prohibit you from talking about or soliciting for a union during non-work time, such as before or after work or during break times; or from distributing union literature during non-work time, in non-work areas, such as parking lots or break rooms. Also, restrictions on your efforts to communicate with co-workers cannot be discriminatory. For example, your employer cannot prohibit you from talking about the union during working time if it permits you to talk about other non-work-related matters during working time.

https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employees/i...

> Also, restrictions on your efforts to communicate with co-workers cannot be discriminatory. For example, your employer cannot prohibit you from talking about the union during working time if it permits you to talk about other non-work-related matters during working time.

I imagine that Googlers are generally permitted to socialise during work time, so they also get to unionise during work time. I even imagine they sometimes use work-provided services to organise non-work-related activity and this is permitted by the company.

I'm fairly sure that quote means workers can talk about the union while working, not stop working and stage a demonstration during work hours.

That said, I do wonder if the fired workers could argue that they were merely taking an unscheduled break (permitted under Google's flextime policy) when demonstrating.

Stopping working and staging demonstrations is pretty core to what unions do.

You're right of course, but not all such actions are protected.

Intermittent strikes, for example, are not.

Who stopped work and staged a demonstration during work hours? The article doesn’t state that anyone did. 200 people demonstrated on a Friday, but it’s quite possible that they had that day off.

Nobody was fired, supposedly, in relation to that demonstration.

> Nobody was fired, supposedly, in relation to that demonstration.

According to Google, but the workers are claiming otherwise.

> but it’s quite possible that they had that day off.

Indeed. In fact, with Google's flextime policy, can't they simply choose to have that day off?

> do your fucking job

> I'm not taking sides

Sure you are not.

> I'm talking simply from a contractual standpoint that you signed on the day of your employment.

As the article states, the people in question were union organizers. It's illegal to fire someone for union activities regardless of what their contract says.

>> It's illegal to fire someone for union activities regardless of what their contract says.

So if you spend all day on "union activities" instead of doing the job that you were contracted to do, you can't be fired for it? That's incredible.

I understand that you can be fired for failing to fulfill your normal duties, if you spend all day doing union activities. The protection in meant for someone who correctly fulfills their work and, in addition, does union activities.

If you read the article you'll find they were fired for stalking and harrassment (if Google is to be believed)

All the article says is that they subscribed to other people's public calendars. I do the same with many of my colleagues, am I harrassing them?

Is it also pure coincidence that these union organizers just happened to be fired for harrassment soon after Google hired a union busting company?

The article also says they shared screenshots of their calendars externally.

At least around here, it's very common to keep union activity outside work e-mail, so management can't simply read it all. I would not be surprised if "externally" means "a coworkers private e-mail address".

Isn't that technically doing their job at Google ?

Apparently they can only do that to their users not co-workers :D

"Don't get high on your own supply" is a widely known rule.

lmao, that's number 4 in the ten crack commandments haha

This joke should have been voted to the top

I'm sure nobody is laid off just because they were doing "union activities". That's the problem I see: label everything as "union activity", therefore, someone can become a sort of sacrosanct person, inmune to everything. No matter what you do, if you label your activities as "union activity" you can hit people on your job that nobody can laid off you.

> illegal to fire someone for union activities regardless of what their contract says.

Pretty sure Google hires good lawyers. If us ramdom HN-ers know this, they probably went through the motions of covering their ass, legally

I kind of understand your line of thought, but it is implicitly taking sides: if employers can just say "you're only allowed to work on X" to shut down any sort of metadiscussion about the conditions under which X is done, that makes any sort of work to change these conditions nearly impossible.

Getting paid X to do Y doesn't entitle the company to abuse you. In the absence of unions that's exactly what happens. You're fired and cast away at a whim, and your rights aren't protected. Acting all self righteous about "getting paid money" is beside the point. That pay only entitles the company to honest work, which you should still do.

The power dynamic is lopsided in the favor of the company, righting this disparity - making things fair naturally hurts the company. Losing your job can be disastrous (especially if fired), and you can't just quit and go somewhere else, if everywhere else is the same. Even moreso for some people. Why don't you let me know all the places that have Engineering or IT unions. I've never heard of one, so they must be very rare, or none existent

Google employees are not “abused”, and if anything, they’re coddled and spoiled. The idea that their employees need a union to protect them from abuse is laughable.

So any company without a union is abusing their employees?

Of course not, I just think the reasoning is very flawed. Abuse is too strong a word, in my opinion for "any company without a union". Others might disagree. The power dynamic is still heavily in favor of the company. Unions can improve this dynamic, but there are obviously issues with them as well.

I don't know, but I wonder why anyone would want to work in an environment like that, where people appear to be constantly fighting against the company and other coworkers. How can anyone work in that environment? Or maybe they can't, given recent flops like the Pixel 4 and Stadia...

On the contrary, these activists are a big downside of working at Google, especially when they are dragging everybody else in. People just want to work on good products in a respectful environment. I wouldn't be surprised if a vast majority of top performers would support firing these people.

In theory yes, but in practice, most workers can not afford quitting and suing their employers. There is a huge asymmetry of power, and unions exist to reduce this asymmetry.

Please don't be vulgar, you can make your point with simpler language too.

As for the protest, the employee's right to protest is an important thing, and taking that away reduces you to an automaton. You'd be giving up the chance to hire great employees that have opinions of their own if you just want people that do what you ask. That puts you behind on innovation, and in the long term creates a very homogenous atmosphere that breeds complacency.

Often times, one cannot make the same statement without using words like "fuck" simply because the resulting statement doesn't have the same intensity. Once can use the word "fudge", but that's really just highlighting that they are replacing "fuck", which was what they really meant. This is true for most intensifying words.

You can replace "do their fucking job" with

"do their damn job" (a word 'like "fuck"', in some sense, but one that people are less likely to be seriously offended by[1])

"do the job they are being paid to do" (stress the key point with words and typography)

"do their job -- you know, the thing Google is actually paying them to do" (words with a bit of sarcasm)

and to my mind all of these options have similar intensity. I don't personally mind "do their fucking job" (at least, I don't mind the swearing; I think the point being made is probably unsound, but that's a separate matter) but it's not by any means the only way to get the point across.

[1] Which is rather odd, if you think about it -- you'd think eternal torture was a nastier thing to have brought to your attention than sex -- but I guess sex is more hard-wired into our brains and few these days believe in eternal damnation.

>you didn't fulfil your contractual obligation to perform Y that you're paid X for?

I'd be interested to see where in this article you saw anyone imply the employees didn't fulfill their work duties?

It's kind of bizarre to me just how cowed the middle class is in the US.

Health insurance is tied to employment, and an uninsured medical condition cropping up is the fastest way out of the middle class in the United States.

So the threat of losing health insurance is a huge sword of Damocles employers get to dangle over employees.

I think that's because we don't have any kind of unifying force in the middle class here to combat the divisive ones. Middle and lower class people have next to no political clout because we're made up of a bunch of adversarial subgroups with their own adversarial subgroups. Democrats and Republicans are both carefully maintained as parties of the rich by encouraging extreme partisanship and propagandizing different versions of reality to different targets.

Consider the possibility that people who disagree with you are doing so in good faith and for a well-thought-out reason, not because they're sheep following a manifestly "wrong" culture.

> If you don't like it, why don't you just quit and then sue the company instead?

When folk talk about the 'privelege' of HN, it's this. Unions exist because your suggested course of action isn't viable for the majority of workers.

Are you implying that those four Google employees were fired for low performance? Is there any evidence that they weren't productive in their respective positions?

Given the vagueness of job descriptions in our field, what is and more importantly - what isn't 'my job' exactly?

Is it or isn't it my job to question bad decisions?

>Hey guys, at the expense of sounding stupid, please educate me - if a company A pays you a salary X to do your fucking job Y and if you use that money and time on activities Z, especially if it negatively affects company A's image / revenues, why shouldn't the company be allowed to fire you as they're losing significant revenues because you didn't fulfil your contractual obligation to perform Y that you're paid X for?

Because as a society we have moved beyond mere wage slaves that just do their job and call it a day, and found that certain activities that are not "contractual obligations" are also necessary for the well functioning of enterprises and societies.

The ability of workers/employees to protest, unionize, etc, has been historically important for all kinds of progress that we now take for granted (or that now has been starting to erode again, or completely eroded).

From hazard pay, to overtime, to paid vacations, to workplace safety gains, to maternity leave without vengeful termination, and all kinds of similar achievements, have been possible by people who organized inside companies.

"Affecting the company's image/revenues" is not a sufficient issue. If the company does bad stuff, treats employees badly, etc, then its image and revenues should justifiably suffer until it fixes those things, and that's good.

>I'm not taking sides nor talking about what's right, what's wrong

Oh, but you do, all the way to the weasel wording (1) "to do your fucking job Y", (2) "you use that money and time on activities Z", (3) "losing significant revenues", (4) "you didn't fulfil your contractual obligation to perform Y".

Who told you that (2), (3), (4) hold exactly, and especially (4)? Organizing some protest or unionizing is totally orthogonal to "performing Y" (your job) or not.

>If you don't like it, why don't you just quit and then sue the company instead?

Because this isn't the 1900s, and employees shouldn't be treated as mere replaceable cogs without rights and without say, even though many employees would prefer it that way.

Typically you don't pay employees when they strike. So the contract is essentially put on hold, where you aren't paying them for that time, so they aren't contractually obliged to do any work for you.

James Dunsmuir, who built Royal Roads (the castle on Victoria Island that is the set for the 'X Men School', later an actual Uni Campus) was a logger baron who would have workers shot for trying to organise.

So it gets very complicated when it comes to workers rights and ostensible legit claims of wrongdoing.

That said, it seems as the though the workers may have crossed some ugly lines which gives G some cover.

Labor rights have a very long history worth learning about. The short of it is that profit from labor is definitional exploitation; the question is how much exploitation we consider economically useful.

They should be happy to not be exploited anymore, then.

This is ridiculous. These engineers are on >100k$ per year and could quit and get employed almost instantly elsewhere at any time. It’s not “exploitation”.

Just because they make a high salary, doesn't mean they're not exploited. Remember that wage fixing scheme where the big tech companies had been found to be suppressing wages by about 20% with mutual non solicits?

This is obviously relative. If someone generates 200k of value and gets 100k in benefit, they are being exploited for that other 100k. That's by definition, as the parent says.

Because everyone likes riding on the high horse and the prospect of moral superiority is too sweet.

Kidding aside, if it's not your money and time on the line, it is hard to see people taking the side of a big co against a normal employee, even if the said employee was actively sabotaging the big co from inside. We are habitual to view all such scenarios as "David vs Goliath" kind of stories.

Google is an international company and in places like Switzerland (where Google has a large engineering presence), under applicable law, trade unions have the right to visit employees at their place of work and to inform them. Be it in offices, construction sites or other business premises. This also includes access with electronic means of communication such as the intranet. So at least for Zooglers, the American dog-eats-dog mentality has no bearing on their contractual relationship with Google.

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