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posted by martyb on Wednesday December 18 2019, @01:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the with-great-responsibility dept.

Kathryn Spiers says Google terminated her after she created a browser tool to notify employees of their organizing rights.

[...] Back in September, Google reached a settlement with the NLRB over earlier alleged violations of federal labor law. Under the settlement, Google was required to post a list of employee rights in its Mountain View headquarters.

[...] So when Google hired a consulting company known for its anti-union work, Spiers wrote a notification that would appear whenever Google employees visited the firm's website. The notification stated that "Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities." That's a legal term of art for worker organizing efforts. It also included a link to the worker rights notification mandated by the NLRB settlement.

[...] Two weeks later, on December 13, Spiers was fired.

[...] The complaint argues that her firing was an "attempt to quell Spiers and other employees from asserting their right to engage in concerted protected activities."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/engineer-says-google-fired-her-for-browser-pop-up-about-worker-rights/

Previous stories:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/12/04/0029250
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/11/26/1411249

Seems like a pattern of abuse to me. Just not necessarily by the employees.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @02:55AM (13 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @02:55AM (#933558)

    What the fuck is it with you yanks and your fear of unions? You know, in other parts of the world, unions are no big deal. Employers have unions too, you know.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday December 18 2019, @03:14AM (2 children)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday December 18 2019, @03:14AM (#933570) Journal

    The US ruling class never made it out of the late 1800s, and it's full of psychopaths.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @03:28AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @03:28AM (#933571)

      And their sycophants haunt online forums.

      • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @10:26AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @10:26AM (#933682)

        Leave khallow alone!

        We are going to form a khallow union, to which only khallows may belong. They will have backhoes for rent, and dream of being wealthy, some day. And they will suck up to rich people, just like real unions, when they go bad. As in Bad Faith.

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @04:31AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @04:31AM (#933597)

    Maybe you're not familiar with the differences between union law in the US and elsewhere.

    Maybe you're also not familiar with the close link between unions and organised crime in the US.

    Possibly you're also not familiar with how unions in the US tend to act as a stranglehold on anything involving personal initiative, whether from the employees or not.

    My actual lived experience with unions in the US: they take your money, and spend it on politics of which you may very well not approve. You have no recourse. They are thoroughly mobbed up, to the point of menaces delivered by career criminals - I never saw it go further than that, because I'm not stupid. Their functionaries are untouchable, while regular employees are only as protected as the union feels like (generally not much). The best thing to do in a union shop is to keep your head down and wait for a promotion opportunity when it's your turn ... or leave and go look for promotion elsewhere, where unions don't insert themselves.

    There's more, but that should be enough. Every time you ask what they've done for you, they do the same tired song-and-dance about the 40 hour work week and the weekend and all that. When you ask what they've done in the last five years, the sound of crickets is deafening.

    I don't like parasites, even when they sing the union songs. Especially when they sing the union songs.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @08:00AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @08:00AM (#933653)

      My actual lived experience with unions in the US: they take your money, and spend it on politics of which you may very well not approve. You have no recourse.

      It's the same in the UK, that point, alone, is why I quit the last union I was ever in (MSF [wikipedia.org]) after an announcement that, as a union, we were supporting a particularly odious (to me, at least) labour party policy without being balloted on it, I though, WTF is going on here?, and it became increasingly obvious from talking to members from other branches that the union fatcats were not representing the views of the members when it came to political decisions, and they were pissed off with it, but what could you do, eh?, I decided, fuck this for a game of tin soldiers, I'm out.

      They are thoroughly mobbed up, to the point of menaces delivered by career criminals - I never saw it go further than that, because I'm not stupid. Their functionaries are untouchable, while regular employees are only as protected as the union feels like (generally not much).

      I can give you an example there of someone being victimised by union (NALGO [wikipedia.org]) functionaries at her place of employment (including a fine wee bit of racial discrimination...she was from South America, the union functionaries doing the discrimination were African..) where it took her husband going to his union's legal attack dogs and siccing them on his wife's union before the 'misunderstandings' stopped. What started it in the first place, you ask?..she had the temerity to start asking where sizeable amounts of council grant money were disappearing to..

      Or, how about a member of the GMB [wikipedia.org] being visited at home by a union suit and several union 'heavies' and told to drop any planned actions against 'a union brotherĀ²*' who caused the accident which disabled him for the rest of his life?

      So, UK unions, not so different under the hood from US ones..

      * brotherĀ², as the drunken bastard was both a union member and a Mason, and the funny handshake brigade 'ran' most of the shipyard union chapters

    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday December 18 2019, @05:05PM (1 child)

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday December 18 2019, @05:05PM (#933785) Journal
      So what you're saying is that you joined the wrong union. Next time pick the steelworkers. I found them okay.
      --
      SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @05:06AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @05:06AM (#934099)

        Yeah, as if you get a choice of union.

        If you're a pilot, it's pretty much going to be their union. Flight attendant, same. Driver for UPS, the Teamsters, and so on, and so on especially in trades like electricians, plumbers, steelworkers and so on.

        If workers had genuine choice about unions, unions would work a hell of a lot harder to appeal to workers. They don't have to, and it shows.

        ... and people wonder why right-to-work is spreading. (No, I don't live in a right-to-work state, but if offered the chance to vote for it I'd be all in.)

  • (Score: 2) by TheReaperD on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:31AM (3 children)

    by TheReaperD (5556) on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:31AM (#933695)

    We've had one half of the political spectrum beat it into our heads that any big organization is bad (except those that are for-profit; those are good) for over 50 years and should be avoided at all costs, including freedom, pay, rights, security, etc. We also have it codified in law that all unions in the US are one of a duopoly [AFL-CIO & Teamsters] (done intentionally to make them lethargic and prevent competition). Given that anti-union sentiment has bled over to the other major party in the US due to them courting "campaign contributions" (read: bribes) from big businesses and the attitude of the other major party and you have a huge clufterfuck (cockup if the previous word doesn't register). Personal responsibility is all well and good but, if you're one of 120,000 employees, your voice doesn't mean shit.

    Google has a huge problem right now because the new management wants to run the company like any other evil corporation but, their workforce is full of people that joined the company when their motto was "Don't be Evil," leading to a huge row between employees and management on a wide range of issues.

    --
    Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:39AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:39AM (#933699)

      *clufterfuck = clusterfuck. Times like these, I hate that there's no edit option.

    • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday December 18 2019, @03:39PM (1 child)

      by Pino P (4721) on Wednesday December 18 2019, @03:39PM (#933747) Journal

      We also have it codified in law that all unions in the US are one of a duopoly [AFL-CIO & Teamsters]

      I'm interested now. Teamsters are part of a trade union coalition called Change to Win Organizing Center [wikipedia.org] (CTW), which broke off from AFL-CIO in 2005. Where in U.S. law are AFL-CIO, CTW, and no other organization recognized as reputable coalitions?

      • (Score: 2) by TheReaperD on Wednesday January 01 2020, @02:56AM

        by TheReaperD (5556) on Wednesday January 01 2020, @02:56AM (#938111)

        I'm not a lawyer so I don't know the actual legal code. What I learned the info from was farm workers in California were striking and formed their own private union among a list of things they charged the leader of the workers was forming an illegal union and they reported that the existing unions were the only unions allowed to exist in the US and no new ones can be formed without the existing two backing it. In the end, the charge was dropped when the AFL-CIO agreed to underwrite the farmworkers' union (much to the farm owners' ire).

        --
        Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @06:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @06:49PM (#933841)

    What the fuck is it with you yanks and your fear of unions?

    They're all run by the mafia, with all the awfulness that goes with that.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @08:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @08:24PM (#933884)

    Denmark - 85.8%
    Norway - 78.2%
    Sweden - 87.1%
    USA - 55.7%

    Those percents are your answer - voter turnout in recent major elections. You want to know who the biggest party, by a landslide, in the US is? Democrats and republicans each go to war over about 25% of the vote a piece. 45% of the rest of society looks on with bemusement at how broken our system is. The party of political disenfranchisement wins, hard.

    The political system in the US is pretty idiotic. Unions introduce politics into the workplace. They then demand money for this, quite a lot of it. And people get to see what unions produce. Public teachers? Police? Post office? Yeah, they have crazy strong unions - and those industries are simply broken: filled with people that need'd to be fired a decade ago, gross ineptitude, broken politics, and a mountain of bureaucrazy for even the slightest issue.

    And then there's corruption. Plays into the reasons for the 45%, but it deserves its own section. The average teacher in the US earns around $55k. This [unionfacts.com] is a list of compensation for the US Teacher's union. Want to double or triple your salary and get power over other people? Become a mid-level union bureaucrat! Creates a pretty broken incentive system and also emphasizes that the union and the union leaders quite rapidly end up becoming entirely different groups of people.