Google fired employees for union activity, says US agency | Hacker News Reader

Google fired employees for union activity, says US agency

bbc.com

63 pointsperfunctory40 comments

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25278781

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25290009

What I find most interesting about these situations - and they've happened in google before - is that the employees are almost always fired for 'security breaches'. Is it a huge coincidence that the employees who want to unionise happen to always be breaching security, or is google just stretching the definition of security breach?

One could even say that their need to breach protocol to unionise is a violation on google's part in the first place. It should be incredibly easy to unionise.

Perhaps Google has a strict security policy with lax enforcement (i.e. regularly violated by employees and normally tolerated) which makes it useful for selectively enforcing against people you need a good reason to fire?

Lex malla, lex nulla (bad law is no law). This is one of the best arguments in favor of either enforcing laws (or rules) to the letter or striking them down. This is the ugly side of leniency.

Neither. Google is selectively enforcing their security policy. The article explains: "It fired a number of staff for violating data security - but the NLRB said the rules were applied only to those engaging in union activity."

Almost every one at all institutions I have worked in the past was guilty of a security breach of some sort. One org mandated that you were not allowed to have the 2FA token and your laptop in the same bag. But almost everyone, including me, at some point had their token on the keyring - if you’d throw that in your backpack, put the laptop in you had a security breach. In another, you were not allowed to leave the laptop in a car unattended - leave it in at the gas station while going to pay: security breach. And so on.

Security breaches are convenient as cause: If rules are sufficiently byzantine, everyone breaches them at some point or another. “Security breach” also sounds bad enough that few will question the decision to fire. “But everyone does it.” is no defense against an alleged security breach. Whether the rules actually increase security doesn’t matter.

Somehow, such dishonesty is tolerated for corporations. That will eventually bite the people back.

Security is personal. Very few people in companies don't violate exposing their user sessions to others unattended, which is a security breach. With GDPR, such lax security may carry million dollar fines, and prison time.

We have that same rule about leaving our work laptop in a car unattended. I've followed that rule pretty religiously, so if I go to the grocery store on my way home, I do my grocery shopping with my laptop bag strapped to my back. But even I've violated that rule at least once when I've left my laptop in the car while I sprint to get my lunch that I forgot in the fridge.

And even though the security risk from the laptop being unattended in the car for less than 60 seconds is a violation, if someone was so determined to get my laptop within that kind of a timespan, they'd be determined enough to grab it off of me in person. So the practical security risk there is zero, but you could still grill my ass for it.

Not commenting on this particular scenario. But one reason for the continued existence of absurd laws impossible to comply with, is to selectively apply it against inconvenient people.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

Richelieu

Security breaches are very convenient.

First, practically any information revealed can be considered security breach even if you just forward a meeting invite with a list of coworkers to your private email or you talked to your friend at a party about what you do at work. This is all explicitly, prominently prohibited by contract (not a google employee but any large corporation I worked did that).

Second, company can avoid releasing too much information about it exactly because it is security matter.

Third, there is usually good track of evidence and it is easy to find. Just look at the mail the person sent outside the company and look for anything they should not be revealing (ie. almost any information).

Fourth, there needs to be no precedent for firing employees for security incidents. Companies do that regularly for valid reasons. And yet as or even more frequently, they decide not to react, also for valid reasons.

Big companies keep getting away from having union being created. Why can't the government make creation of unions mandatory for companies of a certain size?

Germany has „workers councils“. All my interactions with them were negative - they’re extortionate bureaucrats. The idea behind it sounds nice, the reality not so much.

A couple of reasons, first government messing in business is almost always a disaster.

Second, I don't ever want to work in a union environment again. If I don't want to join a union it should be my choice, but as soon as one exists you get this "you Vs the union" mentality.

"Sorry, he was harrasing you? Well, he's in a union and you are not -- so we have to support him".

It's bullshit and horse shit, just look at people getting attacked for working in the UK during the 70's.

If Googler's did manage to unionize what would be some of the biggest changes that would happen at Google as a result? I'm an outsider so I don't have much of a picture into how employees feel about Google. But I am curious about the bigger picture. Feel free to make a throw away if anyone wants to post

I love how the US government, having long been very anti-collectivisation themselves, are now attacking firms for this behaviour. That should tell you how powerful private corporations have become.

"And [google] also accessed an employee slide presentation that was part of a union drive, the complaint said."

Does anyone know if this means that they accessed customer files while doing a 'completely unrelated' investigation?

In other words, if a member of a homeless shelter association is complaining loudly enough about google security's behaviour, will google read their files to find donors they can pressure?

> Does anyone know if this means that they accessed customer files while doing a 'completely unrelated' investigation?

What actually stops Google from doing things like that other than their own internal rules and processes? Nothing really, other than the microscopic risk of getting caught, which they may or may not ignore depending on the advantage Google would gain from bending their own rules.

We're in a situation where we just need to "trust them" to not be evil. How's that working out for us?

In my experience, people that belongs to unions are the lowest performance workers that seek for side ways to keep their jobs.

I don't trust them.

Is that legal in the US? Wow.

It's not legal in the U.S., where union organizing is protected under law. The beginning of the article says:

"Google unlawfully fired employees for attempting to organise a union, a US federal agency has said.

A complaint filed by the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleged that Google unlawfully monitored and questioned its employees about their union activity."

Illegal but also very possibly without consequence. The NLRB has no independent enforcement power, sadly: https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/what-we-do

And that's a good thing

Why?

Because why do some of the smartest and highest paid people on earth need to form a coalition against their highly benevolent employer compared to most. It's hard to feel the plight of a Googler when compared to alternatives. It's not enough to show up and do your job, they want to be able to tell the bosses to fuck off with impunity too. Free speech doesn't apply to the workplace.

Where is the point where you should be able to protect your interests against nameless huge entities?

Is it based on your flat income or on how many times the cost of your labor they make off you?

Unions do more than just negotiate wages and benefits. I imagine some of these other functions may be desirable to Google employees

Having sexual harassment allegations against executives taken seriously was an example. Ensuring that you can’t be fired for unionizing is another.

i'm with grumple. over half of Google's CEOs and founders have been charged with sexual misconduct and worse. schmidt should be in jail.

Isn't Google's name Google? I'm not a fan of huge corporate entities as much as the next guy, but none of them are nameless.

Did you mean: Faceless?

Perhaps what you're saying is a better way of expressing it, but I meant nameless as in being able to put a name to a specific form, identifying it. I think most corporations don't even have a name anymore. It's X (Google for example) until it rebrands to Y (Alphabet in that case), then it's one of their acquisitions that you're working for, then it's one of the companies they use to avoid having you be associated with them and demand equal benefits or whatever etc.

By that metric no one can in the west, compared to the third world countries we all do well.

Google has a lot of employees and contractors and the ones trying to unionize are neither the smartest nor the highest paid. That you describe the most profitable monopoly in America as "highly benevolent" from a 48 minute old account is also hilarious.

This is likely a Google PR account. They could act smarter and be less obvious. It is almost insulting.

Calling Google benevolent is laughable, but even if the aren't the most highly paid workers, these still pretty highly paid workers are stretching the original function of a union to my mind.

Its almost like unions are highly politically motivated and only there to feed the pockets of the political parties that run them, and not to protect the stable salary of workers.

Are all of Google's employees the smartest and the highest paid people on Earth? Wikipedia says that there's about 114 000 Google employees.

Maybe you just don't know? The simple fact that some people want to unionize shows your picture may differ from reality.

I know some people at lower levels (blurring, moderating) being laid off just before one year just because they don't want to consider them as full blown employees.

"Free speech doesn't apply to the workplace"? What a fascist view. We're supposed to shut up and happily serve our corporate overlords for the majority of our waking lifes?

Funny how it's always brand new throwaway accounts that pop up to do this grovelling corporate apologetics for these poor innocent long-suffering megacorps.

If anything, Google's employees are in the best position to unionize. The original concept of organized labour was conceived with skilled tradesmen in mind, since they would be the hardest to replace, and therefore would have the most bargaining power. The concept of the unionized factory floor worker came much later.

From a pure leverage perspective, Google employees, especially in highly specialized areas like ML, are in an excellent position. They are legally entitled to that power, so why shouldn't they wield it?

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