Dozens of Google workers who were fired after internal protests surrounding a lucrative contract that the technology company has with the Israeli government have filed a complaint with labor regulators in an attempt to get their jobs back.
The complaint filed late Monday with the National Labor Relations Board alleges about 50 workers were unfairly fired or placed on administrative leave earlier this month in the aftermath of employee sit-ins that occurred at Google offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California. The protests targeted a $1.2 billion deal known as Project Nimbus that provides artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli government. The fired works contend the system is being lethally deployed in the Gaza war — an allegation Google refutes.
Google jettisoned the workers’ “participation (or perceived participation) in a peaceful, non-disruptive protest that was directly and explicitly connected to their terms and conditions of work.”
As they should. And even if you are on Israel’s side, if you agree that these workers deserved to be fired for this, imagine if they got fired for supporting Israel in some other company.
Workers have essentially zero right to protest on company time on company property and disrupting work.
It would be another thing if, to address your counter-example, an employer went through everyone’s social media and systematically fired everyone who made the “wrong” public stance in an avenue that has nothing to do with the job (still legal probably, but much shittier), but using your own work time to interrupt business operations isn’t going to be tolerated pretty much anywhere.
Again, if these employees had been protesting outside the company offices on their own time and were fired for that, I’d be more sympathetic, but that’s not what happened here.
What would you call a strike?
An extremely specific and highly regulated type of work action has a lot of rules in order to legally be protected.
For instance:
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.
Especially at the level of working for Google, employment is a voluntary agreement, not a right. If the employees find it unconscionable to work for Google, the correct thing to do is to, you know, not work for Google.
Strikes only have so many restrictions because the US government would like to effectively outlaw them without appearing to have outlawed them.
Ding ding ding. It’s the same reason general strikes are outlawed. For the unaware, a general strike is when workers go on strike to protest something not specific to their job. For instance, if rail workers are striking, a general strike would be Google employees going on strike in solidarity.
The government saw how effective general strikes can be, because it puts an immense amount of external pressure on the company being struck. To use the above example, now it’s not just railway workers pressuring the rail company to change. It’s also Google (and any other companies being affected by a general strike) pressuring the rail company to change.
It worked wonders in parts of Europe. It’s a large part of why large parts of Europe have decent worker protections. In fact it worked so well that the US government banned it. Solidarity strikes are outright illegal in the US, because the government knows it works.
Are you making a descriptive or normative claim in your first paragraph?
I postulate there is a lot more to this story than is being told. It was what, 29 employees and later more who were fired? I don’t think this is a simple case of people being idiots.
Your example has occurred in dozens of companies, but people just don’t care.
They got fired for protesting on company property during working hours. They refused to leave an executive’s office when asked.
Iirc they were in a common area in NYC
Raising your voice against unethical business practices should be protected. If my org started selling a device to turn people into soylent green, I’d want the ability to say no without having to quit an otherwise nice job or get arrested saying so. Not to mention, it’s Israel, genocide, and history will absolute view Google as war profiteers.
I always thought it was weird try and get your job back that way. Some severance payout I can understand. An conviction of the company and a fine to be paid to you ( the unfairly fired workers ) . also yes.
But your job back? They’re going to find a way to fire you legally one way or the other. Or deny you any kind of promotion(title or financially ). Heck, make your life hell while working there. Or include you in the next downsizing they do. Why no just sue for money due to unlawful termination?
If they just demand severance, it will be said it was just a stunt to get that money. If they get the job back, they have some time to realign and have the possibility to gather more information/evidence and also keep the topic alive inside the company, maybe even being able to use company channels to target this involvement in war crimes and genocide. I could imagine that this is against a lot of compliance rules even for a company like google.
It’s probably for unemployment benefits as well. Termination for willful violation of company conduct policy will exempt you from claiming unemployment after hearing.
Union representatives are really helpful for protecting employees from repercussions like this.
Thanks for the insights. I’m lucky enough not to have been in this kind of situation before. As I imagined my career would be over, I couldn’t imagine myself trying to get my job back.
I’m in the process of doing this with my former employer (NLRB complaint). It’s not as much trying to get your job back as getting what you’re owed, be it severance or your pound of flesh lol.
A lot of contracts specify that you have to go through arbitration to resolve disputes with the company as opposed to the courts, which is both good and bad. Bad because it takes a while and they’re usually all buddy buddy with the people who pay them, but good because arbitration is pretty expensive and making them do all this when they’d rather be done with you brings me joy.
Also this gives companies the opportunity to use more rope to hang themselves with if they try to do funny stuff with their arbitrator, the NLRB can overrule arbitration decisions if they’re “repugnant”.
Probably miss their cushy Google salary.
Oh no consequences!
