
Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-24/google-urged-the-u-s-to-limit-protection-for-activist-workers
======
josephv
These comments read like a bunch of low-income retail shoppers defending
Walmart because they provide something they otherwise couldn't get.

I think these types of debates are bellwether for programmer/IT professional
unionization. These are the exact types of lawsuits brought against organized
labor as it was trying to get organized to prevent exploitative behavior.

It's disturbing to see these same anti-organization arguments rehashed simply
for a new industry.

~~~
typon
Programmers, maybe ones on HN especially, are super conservative and anti-
labour for some reason. I don't know the history of Silicon Valley enough to
figure out exactly why

~~~
malvosenior
You succeed at programming by spending countless hours on your own with a
computer. Your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion.
From that perspective, organized labor seems like an unnecessary dependency.
Programming is a form of extreme independence many will be hard fought to give
away.

Developers (some) aren't super-conservative, they're libertarian.

~~~
zimpenfish
> Your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion.

If your code isn't using your own libraries compiled by your own compiler
hosted on your own OS running on your self-built machine using a CPU you
designed, no, it isn't. Sure, your own hard work and passion goes a long way
but you rely heavily on the works of others and the privilege of being able to
use them.

~~~
sandov
But people who developed those libraries allow anyone to use them, so you have
the same chance as yor neighbor to develop the next Google, and there are a
lot of smart people trying to do it, and not all of them will succeed.

So, your career is a direct result of your own hard work and passion.

~~~
zimpenfish
> you have the same chance as yor neighbor

That assumes you're starting from the same place and head in the same
direction. You have to know a library exists before you can use it. It has to
be compatible with what you're using. There are many things out of your
immediate control that can influence these things (imagine my next door
neighbour only has an i3 and the fancy functions of the library which make it
100x faster require extensions of an i7. I immediately have an advantage.
There are many subtler advantages that can come into play.)

------
newscracker
There’s something very rotten at the top levels at Google. The “Don’t be evil”
motto has long disappeared and has been replaced by apathy and/or hostility on
different fronts.

Maybe this move by Google is actually good...to help more employees and others
realize how the company has morphed into something that’s no longer doing as
much good for humanity as it used to boast about.

I’m still hopeful that the rot in companies like Google and Facebook will be
the biggest trigger for decentralized and privacy respecting platforms (and
also in this context, preserving the freedom of people to dissent) to grow
faster.

~~~
MattyRad
Relations with Google are definitely starting to sour, here are a few recent
examples:

\- IE switches to Chromium engine, Chrome has full clearance to dominate the
web.

\- Questionable actions toward ad-blocking (seen only just yesterday).

\- Colluding with China to create a blatantly dishonest search engine.

\- Questionable products (Google Fi, Pixel phone, Google Home, etc, are share
their own controversies)

\- Search results quality is decreasing (which is just my personal
speculation, DDG is usually retrieves less polluted results).

Let me know if I missed anything.

~~~
throwaway5752
_Search results quality is decreasing (which is just my personal speculation,
DDG is usually retrieves less polluted results)._

My experience is that DDG results are terrible. I try it periodically and
never lasts more than a day. Has that changed?

~~~
MattyRad
I should clarify, google is rife with visual noise, especially for simple
queries. As an example, try googling "how to clean rain gutters" in both
search engines. You'll need to scroll half down the page, past "Suggested
Clip", past "People also ask", past "Videos", to finally arrive at the 1st
search result. DDG also shows videos, but doesn't require scrolling.

EDIT: I forgot about ads because I use an ad blocker! If you don't use an ad-
blocker, you'll also have to scroll past a large section of ads.

~~~
fixermark
I think you're perceiving some signal as noise. For me personally, that
"Suggested Clip" is what I'd be searching for.

------
m0zg
I didn't realize they had any protection in the first place. That certainly
explains a lot.

Google has a small but extremely vocal (some would say "unhinged") minority of
folks who mostly just do activism on the internal G+ and little else. You can
even find their names online from the various leaks if you'd like to follow
their own proposed practice of blacklisting people they disagree with.

It was always a mystery to me how they manage to stick around for so long.

------
bb101
It just goes to show that a large company is made up of many different people
in different departments, sometimes with different agendas. It appears that
there is a conflict of vision within Google.

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
No, it doesn't. I think it shows precisely what's going on in every MegaCorp
in the US: Woke Capitalism. Everything is calculated to maximize profit,
including campaigning, branding, and marketing to say that you're NOT all
about profit.

In this case, both the saying of soothing things to the people who are
complaining, AND lobbying the government to make those complaints less
effective in the future are in line with the real goal: maximizing the success
of the company, as measured by profits. When viewed through this lens, these
actions do not conflict. In fact, BOTH are REQUIRED.

These only APPEAR to conflict when you think that top leadership actually
REALLY cares about anything other than money, and the influence it brings.

~~~
mehrdadn
What could a company like Google do to convince you that this isn't the case,
if it truly isn't the way you imagine for that company? Because it sounds like
there isn't anything.

~~~
slickbuntu
There really is no other credible argument that they could give. Business must
grow, if they don't they die.

It's predatory no doubt, and Google certainly can't be considered an honest
broker. But this dichotomy is necessary in today's hysterical environment that
social media has created.

It sucks.

~~~
rexpop
> Business must grow, if they don't they die.

Perhaps re-labeling major (and unprecedented) communication/organization
platforms from "businesses" to something akin to "utilities"—or, more
radically, "platform coops"—would quash such apologia.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative)

------
calibas
So they're undermining worker's rights to protect themselves from lawsuits?
And I'm supposed to be okay with it because them pushing to get the rules
changes for their own gain is not lobbying, it's a "legal defense".

That being said, it's foolish to use workplace email to do things like
organize unions.

~~~
alpb
Given Google's level of internal transparency, many employees (as said in the
article) use internal forums to organize action like "walkouts". As you'd
imagine having 60,000+ global employees trying to coordinate stuff over their
personal email would not be possible.

------
austincheney
> If the Labor Board did what Google wanted, “it would have a huge chilling
> effect,” said Google employee activist Colin McMillen

Weird, I guess then they would have to use the employee email system for
employment related matters. There isn't any restriction to prevent any
employee from using a non-employer email system for organizing the very same
activities.

The unintended consequence of allowing this kind of activity in the office
place is the creation of political gravities. If you don't agree with the mass
consensus the majority will find a way to punish the minority opinions. During
one of the private internal all hands Google's chief of HR said their research
indicated this very behavior. If you cannot be honest in the work place then
its a hostile work environment.

~~~
blub
The fact that their employer made special deals with people accused of sexual
harrassment or wanted to work on military projects are employment related
matters.

~~~
austincheney
As a corporate leader what is more important: allowing employees to use
employer resources for personal politics or solving for toxic/hostile
behavior?

~~~
bendoernberg
The answer is that being a human with moral and ethical obligations to the
rest of humanity should take precedence over being a corporate leader. If you
don't sell censorship and weapons tech or cut backroom deals to silence
victims of sexual harassment, there's no need to try to stop your employees
from talking about it.

~~~
barnesto
And there’s nothing preventing employees from finding a new place to work if
they don’t agree with how their company handles things. It’s a multinational
corporation not college or even a democracy.

~~~
sdenton4
These are systemic problems in the industry, though. Leaving google will
almost certainly place you in a company where the situation is worse, and
where the ability to set industry standards is less.

As for the "it's not a democracy:" I ask why we tolerate that. In a country
founded in individual freedoms, we're apparently ok with creating no-freedom
zones that pretty much every adult has to spend half of their waking hours in.

~~~
austincheney
> Leaving google will almost certainly place you in a company where the
> situation is worse

That is a baseless assumption. For me a toxic work culture is the worse
situation.

The US was founded on the concept of liberty more so than on the concept of
democracy, which is how we ended up with a federal republic and an electoral
college. According to JS Mill the greatest enemy to liberty is a hostile
majority.

------
samfriedman
Oh, to read the Google employee forums today... I wonder how those "activist
employees" will respond this time.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
They'll be upset and "outraged", before returning to work. I keep thinking,
each time Google is in the news, that this is finally the day engineers will
just walk off the job and not come back. But I know it probably isn't. Even
those who have every ability to find a new job quickly will find some excuse
to justify staying.

~~~
Retric
Google has a very high turnover rate relative to company age pay etc at just
3.2 years on average.

So, I suspect they really do lose a lot of people over this stuff, they just
keep hiring at a very fast pace.

~~~
bmj
I wonder at what point working for Google will lose its shine, and their
hiring pace will drop off.

~~~
wasdfff
People make a living building missiles payed for with public money that blow
up schoolbusses across the world just to put their own children in a better
school district. When people get a decent paycheck no one thinks about how
much that dollar cost.

~~~
bunnycorn
If you think your country commits such acts of war crimes, then you should
flee your country today.

If you are not building the missiles, you are paying taxes that go to buy
those missiles to blow up school buses.

As an Electrical Engineer, I would be glad to help my country or the allies of
my country to build missiles to help in the war effort.

If we don't help, we will end up with barbarians blowing up our neighbourhood.

~~~
asdff
You are correct, it is pretty heinous that we are all beholden to paying the
war industry vast sums of money. Is it really worth it to spend millions on
missiles that notoriously miss their targets? Wouldn't a very small trained
team of operators be much better and far cheaper at safely eliminating a
threat than blowing up an entire apartment complex from a desk hundreds of
miles away with a missile that costs more than everything in that town? In
August, Saudi Arabia fired a missile that killed 40 school children (1),
probably one of the many weapons they bought from the US. I'm sure that
missile that ended their lives cost 1000x more than whatever school building
they were bussing to when they became the latest victims of geopolitical
theater.

At which point do you realize you are engineering more and more expensive and
advanced ways of killing for the sake of skimming personal profit for
executives and investors out of public budgets? If I worked for one of these
companies, I don't think I could live with myself with that huge guilt,
knowing my great efforts lead directly to further destabilizing the world and
ending peoples lives. I'm not comfortable using my skills to perfect ending
peoples lives. That isn't innovation, that isn't advancement, that is
regression. Raytheon is the barbarian blowing up the neighborhood, not a
Yemeni schoolkid.

1\. [https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/13/middleeast/yemen-
children...](https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/13/middleeast/yemen-children-
school-bus-strike-intl/index.html)

------
genericresponse
Are we going to ignore that Google responded that they published this as part
of a legal defense rather than a lobbying effort. From the article: "We're not
lobbying for changes to any rules." Rather, she said, Google's claim that the
Obama-era protections should be overturned was "a legal defense that we
included as one of many possible defenses"

I'm not saying that makes it right, but I see a difference between pushing for
it as an independent agenda and using it to defend yourself from a legal
filing. IANAL, but Legal arguments tend to be set up as: They are wrong
because of argument 1, and even if you don't agree with argument 1 they are
wrong because of argument 2, and so on through argument n. You include
everything that's relevant in that list to preserve it for future appeals even
if you have some pretty weak or controversial arguments.

~~~
pdpi
> Are we going to ignore that Google responded that they published this as
> part of a legal defense rather than a lobbying effort.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. I'd go as far as to say that this
actually makes it _worse_, not better. Saying that that those protections are
important is easy when there's nothing at stake. The fact that they then
called for their overturn when the chips are down is how you know what they
really think about it.

~~~
koboll
It's silly to equate a legal defense with a belief though.

I may not have the belief, personally, that spontaneous crimes of passion
deserve a light sentence, but it would be malpractice for my lawyer to
therefore not advance that argument if, god forbid, I was convicted of a
murder. Whether I committed the murder or not, and whether or not I believe
those sentencing guidelines should be extrapolated to wider society, as a
lawyer you have an obligation to use every tool in your arsenal that can help
your client. It has nothing to do with your own personal or political views on
whether those tools should exist.

~~~
rootusrootus
Assertions of certain politicians to the contrary, corporations are not
people, and Google wasn't defending against a crime of passion.

~~~
koboll
Sure, I wrote a contrived example. But the onus, I think, is on the critics in
this thread to provide the theory of legal ethics under which attorneys should
refrain from advancing the most effective defense of their clients if doing so
might cause public relations concerns. It's my understanding that zealously
defending their clients within the bounds of the law is among an attorney's
highest obligations.

~~~
pdpi
To use an equally contrived example of my own — there's plenty of
jurisdictions where arguing something along the lines of "look at how she was
dressed, she was asking for it" will get you off the hook on rape charges.
Would you still argue that an attorney who makes that argument is merely
"advancing the most effective defense of their clients"? Or would you find
that conduct reprehensible both for the attorney, and the client who allowed
the attorney to use that line of reasoning?

Ultimately, it's your own choice what lines of arguing you present, and you
don't get an ethical freebie just because it's "effective".

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> To use an equally contrived example of my own — there's plenty of
> jurisdictions where arguing something along the lines of "look at how she
> was dressed, she was asking for it" will get you off the hook on rape
> charges.

Rape is an unusually problematic situation because consensual sex and
unconsensual sex produce a lot of the same physical evidence, and it's
possible for someone to consent but after the fact have regrets or experience
social pressure.

That leaves you having to evaluate evidence of whether or not there was
consent. If you're a falsely accused defendant trying to rebut a claim that
she didn't consent, what evidence of that do you propose to use?

Also notice that _look at how she was dressed_ is a particularly ineffective
"get out of jail free card" when the accuser was a nun dressed in her habit.

The implications of that, i.e. that you're more credible if you dress
conservatively and don't attend frat parties, are very politically
inconvenient.

But a black man has a constitutional right to carry a handgun, which also
makes it more likely that he'll be shot by the police who will use it as a
defense. It would be better if these trade offs didn't exist, but how do you
propose to make them not?

~~~
stale2002
It is not about "making a proposal to make sure these tradoffs don't exist".

Instead it is about morally judging someone for making a morally reprehensible
argument.

If there is some country in the world where black people don't have equal
rights, and a company uses this as a legal defense for it's behavior, then I
am going to judge the company as being full of horrible horrible human beings.

One does not get a free pass for your behavior, just because it is legal. Onr
instead should get judged for the horrible person that one is.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Someone is a horrible person if they are falsely accused of something and use
the argument that most effectively allows them to avoid being falsely
convicted of it?

It seems to me if you have a country where some people don't have equal
rights, the problem is the law, not any individual defendant. That's the easy
one to fix, in the sense of knowing what should be done. Much easier than
trading false positives against false negatives when there is no way to
actually know what happened.

~~~
stale2002
I am saying that if you make an argument in court that says "This law should
be overturned!" as google literally did, then I am going to assume that this
means that you think the law should be overturned.

And I will judge you morally if I believe overturning this law is a bad thing.

A company is responsible for it's actions. And if it's actions in court cause
a good law to be overturned, as is their stated argument, then I will judge
them very poorly for this.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
The problem is that everything is always complicated.

If employees use the company's email system to discuss politics, then the
company's email system contains their policy views, which may not be the
company's. Then the company gets sued by someone else who gets a copy of those
emails and uses the employees' personal views as evidence of the company's
official position.

A solution to that would be to have the law be that political discourse can't
be used as evidence of policy or intent in a court case. That might be a good
solution, but there may not be support for it in the existing law.

The alternative would be to prevent employees from using the company's
official channels for their political discussions, to create a brighter line
between official and personal speech. Arguing for the second thing is worse --
it has a lot of other problems -- but arguing for the first thing may not be
possible under existing law, leaving it as the company's only apparent
alternative to avoid liability. What are they supposed to do then?

~~~
stale2002
> What are they supposed to do then?

What they should do is follow the law, and not try to get rid of worker
protections.

I don't care that it has negative effects on them. I am going to judge them
morally, for trying to get rid of a good law.

The whole point of laws is to prevent companies from doing bad things, that
might be in their interests.

------
daveheq
Why is it the most profitable companies fight the most against spending money
on workers? They of all should be able to afford it. Take that money you're
blowing on fighting us and spend it on us so we're living happier and
healthier lives.

------
mmaunder
Perhaps I'm missing something, but Google seems to experience far more labor
action than most other large tech employers. Why is that?

~~~
friedman23
Because they cave into the demands for better or for worse.

~~~
rrcaptain
All employers cave to labor action.

------
ChuckMcM
I realize that Bloomberg probably slants this for clicks but it is another
example of why I left Google when I did.

All organizations that I have been a part of have something which might be
called a 'dissonance' level. That would be defined as the difference between
the policies that were being pursued by the leadership versus the messaging
and communication on policies that were being communicated to employees. When
dissonance is low, there are only small, and insignificant, differences
between the two. When dissonance is high there are large differences between
them. Two examples during my tenure which highlighted this were a change to
the employee store and the other a change on juices.

To set the background, when I joined every employee got a credit for the
employee store, and the prices in the store were half off for employees. This
was a nice way to give new folks some logo wear which would show off the brand
but in a way the knew they could use. Later this was changed to no credit when
you were hired and a flat 20% discount. The actual reason this was done (and
came out eventually) was because it was money management didn't want to spend
any more. They wanted the store to be 'revenue neutral' with respect to
employees. It was presented first as a way of correcting "abuse" where people
would do their Christmas shopping at the Google store, or managers using it to
give everyone on their team some schwag as a spot bonus. At the time, free
cash flow (aka net money going into the bank account every quarter) was nearly
$2B, with a cash flow per employee of $100,000 a quarter (or $400,000 a year)
and management was upset that they "gave away" $150 to every new employee and
"lost" about $15 per employee _per year_ on margin in the Google store. The
new CFO at the time (Pichette) was extraordinarily cheap. But the problem
wasn't that they took that away, the problem was that they didn't own it like
a grown up company would. Instead they created this fiction of a "big problem"
that was being corrected that deflected anger from management for taking away
a "perk" to fellow employees who were "abusing the system."

Similarly a year later they swapped vendors for juice from Naked Juice to
Odwalla, and then pretty much stopped restocking juices. It was presented as a
problem with Naked Juice being able to provide for Google's needs, and yet
once again it wasn't actually the story. The story was money. Odwalla was
cheaper and not as many people liked it so overall consumption would go down,
by not restocking popular flavors the juice refrigerator could have "juice" in
it and give air cover to manager for not taking away juices while insuring
that as little as possible would be consumed.

The pattern was very clear, the messaging was "We're this hip company that is
employee focused and care about what you need to do great work" but the actual
policy was "We're just another greedy corporation who will lie to our
employees in order to extract _and keep_ as much value as possible out of the
people who work for us."

Not exactly a ringing endorsement. And now we find they say "express yourself,
we're open here" to the employees while they lobby to get the laws changed so
they can fire trouble makers? Not a big surprise to me.

That said, it can be a fun place to work and there are amazing people there to
work with. If you don't care about "fair" compensation and treat all of the
company messaging as fiction, it was a place where you could take on tasks
that no where else was ready to take on yet. I got to play with a huuuuge
storage cluster to do some really useful research on that. No storage company
in the world would have been able to field, much less give a couple of
engineers pretty much exclusive access to for a couple of months. Eventually
though, I just couldn't continue to look away from the dissonance and had to
leave.

------
skookumchuck
The harder it is for a company to fire people, the more reluctant they will be
to hire risky people.

The easier it is to fire, the more willing a company will be to hire risky
people.

Can't have it both ways.

------
cannabis_sam
”Don’t draw attention to your evil”

------
chkaloon
Maybe workers shouldn't be punished for it, but as an organizer why in the
world would you use the company email? All company email is subject to
potential review by management. Why would you give up s strategic advantage
like that? Seems silly.

------
dbg31415
[https://duck.com](https://duck.com)

------
techrich
I am not supprised that they are doing this, if you dont like what they are
doing then dont work there. Why should people who work there be protesting
their own company! They should expected be fired.

------
gcb0
can someone translate this in a way any layperson can understand?

""" In an emailed statement, a Google spokeswoman said, "We're not lobbying
for changes to any rules." Rather, she said, Google's claim that the Obama-era
protections should be overturned was "a legal defense that we included as one
of many possible defenses" against meritless claims at the NLRB. """

thanks!

------
arnonejoe
Don't be evil.

~~~
h0undawg1
What's evil about this?

------
mtgx
No wonder they obliterated "Don't be evil" from the workers' code of conduct.

This, yet again, reinforces the idea that people with good values are no
longer welcome to work for Google anymore.

But some, the same people who LOVE to point out that "Don't be evil" is still
forgotten somewhere in the last line of the workers' conduct, will likely
remain skeptical that Google is becoming _more evil_ by the month.

~~~
SquareWheel
>No wonder they obliterated "Don't be evil" from the workers' code of conduct.

Of course they didn't do this. As your own comment goes on to prove. You
should not encourage the spread of misinformation just because it suits your
world view.

------
random_kris
Companies are people... I fint it funny that we talk about companies like a
sentinent being..

------
googlerthrowaw
I'm a googler, going anonymous for soon-to-be obvious reasons.

While I think this headline is overblown, I think the change would be for the
better. For the past couple of years working at Google has been like what I'd
imagine it's to work for the Trump administration: constant scandals, people
around you being outraged, constant diversion of internal attention to issues
unrelated to the core business etc.

Nominally the internal culture is all for open communication and being
yourself. However, it's far easier to express an opinion that signals your
'good' and 'acceptable' values by eg. demanding Google shuts down anything
that's even remotely suspicious. This leads to the loudest voices being the
most extreme ones and makes you feel like you're alone with your opinion if
you happen to favor nuanced debate over knee jerk reactions. For example, I
think Dragonfly is a good idea and something we should pursue - but honestly,
I'm only comfortable expressing that opinion to a select few coworkers in a
private setting.

This brings me to my point of why I think more company control over worker
organization might be good. I take pride in my work ethic. My dad raised me to
respect the work I do. And every time a new scandal comes along and the
internal company focus gets diverted to an issue on which only a small part of
the company feels comfortable expressing their opinions of, my attention gets
diverted and my work suffers. As does the company as a whole. As a stock
owner, having an internal company culture less focused on outrage would be a
great improvement.

~~~
cf141q5325
I dont think anyone is arguing it wouldnt be better for stock owners. Workers
rights are generally the opposite of an improvement for stock owners. Thats
not what they are there for. Its targeted at improving and safeguarding
workers and in a broader sense society. In this case its so employees arent
just silently doing what they are told matter the consequences those actions
will have for the rest of the world.

~~~
malvosenior
He's also speaking as an employee who is uncomfortable with the current state
of Google. Do workers rights include the right to not be constantly bombarded
with political messaging you don't agree with and to be intimidated into
keeping your own opinions silent?

This poster's message and the internal dialog that came out during the Damore
hearing make Google sound like a horrible place to work that is aggressively
overly politicized. So yeah, the stock holders would benefit from this but so
would the employees.

~~~
cf141q5325
>Do workers rights include the right to not be constantly bombarded with
political messaging you don't agree with and to be intimidated into keeping
your own opinions silent?

As a said, workers but also in a broader sense society.

edit: Maybe a more concrete example would help, lets take Whistleblower
protection for example

------
BFatts
"Do no evil" \- my ass

------
neves
Wow, don't they have a "Do no evil" printed around?

~~~
sudoaza
They quietly removed the "Do no evil" when they renamed into alphabet

~~~
SquareWheel
Please don't spread misinformation. Alphabet created a new motto but Google
never removed theirs. It's still very clearly in their code of conduct.

Alphabet's Code: [https://abc.xyz/investor/other/code-of-
conduct/](https://abc.xyz/investor/other/code-of-conduct/)

Google's Code: [https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-
conduct/](https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/)

~~~
JeremyBanks
<withdrawn due to legal concern, but parent is misrepresenting the situation>

~~~
SquareWheel
The code of conduct is where the motto has always been. It is hardly "some
document".

Your other claims are merely speculative and unprovable.

------
mises
I tend to agree with the people saying there's a problem in Google. But that
said, I also think Google should have the right to say what can and can't be
broadcast. Otherwise, you make the company transmit, broadcast, and
disseminate viewpoints: coercing speech.

~~~
skh
I don’t see how allowing workers to use workplace email to organize can be
equated to coercing speech. Worker protections in the U.S. are quite poor in
relation to the EU. I see no evidence that further limiting worker rights
would be good for the people.

~~~
chrismeller
Most companies, even in the EU, say that workplace systems are for performance
of job duties only. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily legally enforceable,
but either way it’s a much more nuanced argument than it’s being portrayed as.

If I have a right to use company systems to organize a strike, how do they
then account for those messages in their normal record keeping and compliance
procedures? Do they also have to retain them for x years along with everything
else? If they have some kind of mandatory audit procedure how do they separate
those emails out so that they aren’t reviewed on a regular basis? If someone
sexually harasses someone in what is not specifically a workplace
communication but do it over company email how does that impact their
liability? How does it impact what materials may have to be handed over for
any kind of other lawsuit?

If I were going to protest the company who is actually paying me presently I
would never do it using their email system so for me it’s a moot point, but
it’s not quite as cut and dry as an evil corporation trying to restrict the
rights of workers.

~~~
jkaplowitz
Google has never, as far as I know, required that work email systems be used
for performance of job duties only. They certainly want work usage to be
primary, and in some countries and circumstances they claim more rights to
intellectual property created using work systems that they otherwise wouldn't
claim, but they do allow incidental personal use.

In my experience working there in the past (before these cultural issues
became a main focus), it was a major perk to, for example, be discussing a
news item about a quantum computing device on a suitably targeted mailing list
and have someone with quantum physics expertise chime in. :) Also informal
peer-to-peer financial planning advice and many other topics.

Note I haven't worked for Google or Alphabet since early 2015 and certainly am
not speaking for them here.

~~~
chrismeller
And I’ve never worked for Google or Alphabet. The company has nothing to do
with it, this is about a supposed moral issue that should (I hope) apply to
every company, not just them.

~~~
jkaplowitz
Your initial argument in the post I was replying to seemed to be based on the
assumption that Google forbade non-work use of work email; I was simply saying
they don't, so the nuances around those bans don't apply. That's all I was
addressing.

