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Googler Says She was Fired for Telling Colleagues about Worker Rights

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

Freeman writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re:Fuck you, dingbat (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 brother²*' 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..

  * brother², as the drunken bastard was both a union member and a Mason, and the funny handshake brigade 'ran' most of the shipyard union chapters

  Parent

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