If you reread my comment, I spend a couple paragraphs explaining the procedural background to this. If the NLRB had found Damore's complaint valid, they would have intervened on his behalf. They did not, so they will not.
Apparently, there's no private right to action under the NLRA. Enforcement is public, and goes through the NLRB. If the NLRB decides against pursuing a case, that's probably the end for you (maybe short of suing the NLRB itself).
1. You believe that Damore's lawyers withdrew the claim because the NLRB said they wouldn't pursue it. Is that a correct assessment? That's the timeline AFAICT anyway. Does that make the memo a public statement of what they informed Damore of? Is that common, for the NLRB - or similar institutions - to release a memo about a withdrawn action? I'm not American so this all seems very odd to me. I just can't imagine a government body commenting on a withdrawn complaint here.
2. You have not read the memo itself. Is that true? Do you know where it is or where I can read it? How would I even start?
I'm not being critical, I just have no idea how the US's state and federal laws combine, and it all seems very complicated, procedurally odd and very overlapp-y.
You are looking at the wrong case, this is the correct one and contains a link to the Advice Memo, which is dated January 16: https://www.nlrb.gov/case/32-CA-205351
This is what an Advice Memo is: "The NLRB analyses referred to are NLRB Advice Memos, which are prepared by the Office of the General Counsel (GC), a division within the NLRB, to respond to requests for advice from various NLRB Regions across the country about the proper response to some specific fact pattern under the Act. In answering these requests, the General Counsel considers the facts of the specific question posed and analyzes Board precedent relating to the situation.
The GC then reaches a conclusion whether the particular fact pattern violates the Act or not. If the fact pattern does not violate the Act, the Office of General Counsel indicates the unfair labor practice charge should be dismissed. If it finds a violation, it will direct the Region to issue a complaint if the matter is not settled in accordance with its analysis of the law.
All this analysis, and the conclusions, are incorporated into a document known as an Advice Memorandum. These Advice Memos are distributed for the information of all NLRB Regions so that they will all have the same guidance and can address similar questions in a coordinated and consistent manner throughout the United States. The Advice Memorandum does not have the same authoritative force as a published decision of the Board, but it does set out the agency's enforcement position on the questions covered and provides guidelines that will be followed by all Regions when faced with a similar situation.”
So what happened was Damore filed a complaint under the National Labor Relations Act with the National Labor Relations Board. The regional office turned it over to the central office for advice, given the novel issues. The central office decided to decline the case, viewing it as not a violation of the National Labor Relations Act. I don't know whether Damore could still privately sue Google for violating the National Labor Relations Act in court or appeal this decision somehow; perhaps he had some rights, since from the link it looks like he withdrew his case on January 23, a week after the date of the advice memo. He does, however, still have a pending lawsuit against Google, which at the very least, could allege violations of numerous other laws other than (and perhaps also including) the National Labor Relations Act (e.g., California state law).
> The NLRB turned down Damore's complaint
Can you explain where you got this idea from? Not this article, because it states several contradictory or non-commital things such as:
> Damore withdrew his complaint in January
And
> "a federal agency lawyer concluded."
And
> an associate general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board wrote in a six-page memo disclosed Thursday
Is this just an opinion, or an actual ruling? In other words, is this a PR exercise by the NRLB, or is it an official ruling in some way?
https://nlrb.gov/case/32-CA-203891 appears to be the case - AFAICT as the dates lineup with the withdrawl statement, and https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Anlrb.gov+james+dam... shows this as the only link. As a non-American, I'm not going to file a FOI request, so I have no idea what any of this is, or how to find the memo that Bloomberg quotes.
Can you (or anyone else) shed any actual, source not third party light on this?