Tech

A new document reveals more about Google’s anti-union strategy


A newly released material elucidation Googleefforts to prevent activism, including unions, among its employees. In an order filed Friday, an administrative law judge from the National Labor Relations Board asked Google to turn over to attorneys representing a group of current and former employees relevant documents. to “Project Vivian” and hiring a consulting firm to advise employers struggling with union efforts.

Google launched Project Vivian to discourage employees from uniting after worker activism began to heat up in late 2018. By order, Michael Pfyl, Google’s director of employment law, was quoted as saying. Describes Project Vivian’s mission as “Attract more active employees and convince them that unions attract. The context for Pfyl’s description is not clear compared to the order, which also alludes to an attempt to use media to quietly disseminate Google’s view of unified tech workplaces.

The judge, Paul Bogas, ordered Google to comply with parts of the subpoena for documents related to Project Vivian, as well as Google’s hiring of IRI Consultants, the anti-union firm. In November, Bogas issued a similar order for other documents related to Vivian and IRI; The subpoena includes more than 1,500 documents.

The subpoena was part of an NLRB case brought by seven employees and former Google employees in December 2019. (A former employee has been settled.) Five workers were fired and two were fired. were disciplined after they engaged in positive workplace practices, including an effort to improve working conditions for Google contractors, and filed a petition calling on the company to terminate contracts with U.S. government agencies related to immigrant deportation and family separation. Paul Duke, one of the fired employees who made the allegation, said that the organization was part of an effort to lay the groundwork for a union.

In response to claims by former employees that they were fired in retaliation for workplace organization, a Google spokesperson wrote, “The base case here has nothing to do with co-op. It’s about employees violating explicit security protocols to improperly access confidential information and systems”—a reference to internal documents the employee had access to.

Duke flatly denied that he and his colleagues violated security protocols, saying that all engineers had access to the documents and that the company subsequently classified them as “” need to know”.

In opposing the subpoena, Google claimed attorney-client privilege and “work product privilege,” protecting documents prepared before litigation occurred. Bogas dismissed many of these claims, calling one “seriously, an overreach.” In his attempts to describe a potential union election as a lawsuit, and thus favor, he writes, “The respondent cannot make reality merely a primitive organizing effort. between employees into ‘dispute’ – like straw rolled into gold – allowing it to cloak itself in privilege over all aspects of its anti-organizational campaign. “

Bogas’ order refers to efforts by Google executives, including corporate counsel Christina Latta, to “find a ‘respected voice to publish an op-ed outlining a public workplace’ what a unified technology should look like’, and urged employees of Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Google not to merge. The order said that in an internal message, Google’s chief human resources officer, Kara Silverstein, told Latta she liked the idea, “but it should be done so that ‘there will be no fingerprints and no fingerprints’ is a Google-specific signature.’” Following the order, IRI subsequently provided a draft of the proposed op-ed to Latta; It is not clear whether the article has been published.

.



Source link

news7g

News7g: Update the world's latest breaking news online of the day, breaking news, politics, society today, international mainstream news .Updated news 24/7: Entertainment, Sports...at the World everyday world. Hot news, images, video clips that are updated quickly and reliably

Related Articles

Back to top button