Google accused of union busting after firing the ‘Thanksgiving Four’

Employees have a legal right to organise a union at their workplace, so why is Google firing them when they try to do so?

Google has been accused of “union busting” by activists over the firing of four employees who reportedly were attempting to organise.

The tech giant says the employees were fired for violations of its data security policies, according to a Bloomberg report, which cites a memo sent to all Google employees.

The BBC reports the employees, dubbed the “Thanksgiving Four”, were fired by Google on Monday.

When contacted by Fox News, Google declined to comment on the terminations or confirm the names of the terminated employees but did confirm the contents of the note published by Bloomberg.

The employees had their contracts terminated following a protest at Google’s San Francisco office on November 22, according to the BBC, which reported that two of the terminated employees spoke at the protest.

Rebecca Rivers, who reportedly spoke at the protest, tweeted on Monday that she had been terminated.

I was just informed by @Google that I am being terminated.

— Rebecca Rivers (@Tri_Becca90) November 25, 2019

Bloomberg reports that Ms Rivers said she was targeted for protesting against US Customs and Border Protection, which is reportedly testing a Google cloud product.

In a statement posted to Medium on Monday, Google Walkout for Real Change, an activist group for Google employees, slammed the company over the firings.

Google's Next Moonshot: Union Busting [Thread]https://t.co/xIP6cdbrZa

— Google Walkout For Real Change (@GoogleWalkout) November 26, 2019

“Four of our colleagues took a stand and organised for a better workplace,” it said in the statement. “This is explicitly condoned in Google’s Code of Conduct, which ends: ‘​​​​​And remember … don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up’.”

“When they did, Google retaliated against them. Today, after putting two of them on sudden and unexplained leave, the company fired all four in an attempt to crush worker organising,” the statement added.

The firing of the ‘Thanksgiving Four’ has deepened staff-management tensions at a company once seen as a paradigm of Silicon Valley freedoms but now is embroiled in numerous controversies. Picture: Josh Edelson / AFP

In 2018, Fox News reported that Google dropped the “don’t be evil” phrase from its official code of conduct.

Accusations of union busting have been swirling around Google, with Senator Bernie Sanders recently blasting the company for working with IRI Consultants. The firm provides “union vulnerability assessments”, according to its website, identifying “key vulnerabilities and risks that could become the target of an organising campaign”.

“This type of union busting is unacceptable. I say to Google: It is time to address the racism, harassment, and harmful contracts at your company and treat your workers with the respect and dignity they deserve,” Senator Sanders tweeted on November 22.

This type of union busting is unacceptable. I say to Google: it is time to address the racism, harassment, and harmful contracts at your company and treat your workers with the respect and dignity they deserve. https://t.co/mXkrbjSXYR

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) November 22, 2019

In the statement posted to Medium, Google Walkout for Real Change said the company “hired a union-busting firm” and, around the same time, “redrafted its policies, making it a fireable offence to even look at certain documents”.

“The policy was unclear, even explicitly stating the documents didn’t have to be labelled to be off limits,” the statement added. “No meaningful guidance has ever been offered on how employees could consistently comply with this policy.

“Using this policy, Google did all it could to frame our colleagues as ‘leakers’,” the statement continued. “This is a lie.

“With these firings, Google is ramping up its illegal retaliation against workers engaging in protected organising, This is classic union busting dressed up in tech industry jargon, and we won’t stand for it.”

In the memo published by Bloomberg, Google says the four employees were dismissed “for clear and repeated violations of our data security policies”.

“We want to be clear that none of these individuals were fired for simply looking at documents or calendars during the ordinary course of their work,” the memo adds.

Much has been made about the ‘cool perks’ of working at Google, but its employees are looking for more than ping pong tables and nap pods. Picture: Bryan R. Smith / AFP

Google defended its work with IRI Consultants in an email to Fox News, describing recent criticism as unfounded.

“We work hard to make Google the best place to work for our growing workforce around the world,” a spokeswoman said. “We engage dozens of outside firms to provide us with their advice on a wide range of topics. To suggest this particular firm had anything whatsoever to do with the recent calendar extension – or any internal policies whatsoever – is absolutely false.”

In October, Bloomberg reported that a number of Google employees were concerned about a calendar extension tool for their Chrome browsers, which they said could be used as a surveillance tool to spy on efforts to organise. Citing an internal memo, Bloomberg reported that the extension would flag internal calendar events that required more than 10 meeting rooms or more than 100 participants.

Google says IRI did not even know about the extension. The tech giant describes the Chrome extension as a pop-up reminder that asks people to be mindful before auto-adding a meeting to the calendars of large numbers of employees. The tool does not prevent “calendaring” and does not collect personally identifiable information, according to Google.

In addition, Google says IRI did not participate in updating the company’s community guidelines, changes to the firm’s weekly TGIF all-hands meeting or reminders sent about policies.

Google employees have been highly vocal in protesting several issues in recent years. In November 2018, thousands of Google workers took part in a mass global walkout to protest sexual harassment, pay inequality and the company’s workplace culture.

Google employees staged a global walkout last year. Picture: Tolga Akmen / AFP

The tech giant’s corporate contracts have also been in the spotlight. Google, for example, faced an employee backlash over its involvement in Project Maven, a controversial military program that uses artificial intelligence for drone targeting. In June 2018, the company issued an update to how it would use artificial intelligence, saying it would not “design or deploy AI” for “weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people”.

Google also faced employee opposition over its potential plans to build a censored search engine for China – known as Dragonfly. The controversial plan has since been abandoned.

In June, Google employees, community activists and investors protested outside the headquarters of parent company Alphabet amid a backlash over a series of incidents related to hate speech, the spread of white supremacist videos and misinformation.

— with Christopher Carbone.

This article originally appeared on Fox News and was reproduced with permission