> Google “retaliated against approximately 50 employees and interfered with their Section 7 rights by terminating and/or placing them on administrative leave in response to their protected concerted activity, namely, participation (or perceived participation) in a peaceful, non-disruptive protest that was directly and explicitly connected to their terms and conditions of work,” the complaint reads.
Seems very thin to call on the NLRA here. The "protesters" stated goals were to disrupt work even for people not a member of the non-union (therefore not a strike) which is not a protected activity. Moreover, were any of these employees or any members of the minority union actually working on the Israeli contracts they objected to? While you can protest against your job duties under the NLRA (or job duties of your collective union members) I don't see that you can protest against company functions which aren't job duties you or your class aren't a part of.
If the workers had just walked off the job and peacefully and non-disruptively protested in front of the building and refused to go back to their job until they (or other members of the minority union) had their job duties modified so they were not working on those projects and google had fired them, that seems like it would violate the NLRA.
Anyway this seems like some fun FAFO. I wonder how many of the people who got fired were even members of the non-union before the "protest".
But my read of the situation while skimming the NLRB summary [1] is this complaint is unlikely to win
> Strikes unlawful because of misconduct of strikers or other loss of protection. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a “sitdown” strike, when employees simply stay in the plant and refuse to work is not protected by the law.
This feels pertinent, but not a whole match.
> Furthermore, Section 8(b)(4) of the Act prohibits strikes for certain objects even though the objects are not necessarily unlawful if achieved by other means. An example of this would be a strike to compel Employer A to cease doing business with Employer B. It is not unlawful for Employer A voluntarily to stop doing business with Employer B, nor is it unlawful for a union merely to request that it do so. It is, however, unlawful for the union to strike with an object of forcing the employer to do so. These points will be covered in more detail in the explanation of Section 8(b)(4). In any event, employees who participate in an unlawful strike may be discharged and are not entitled to reinstatement.
On the summary page, this looks like striking to prevent their employer from doing business with another employer (IDF) and might apply, but further reading seems to indicate this is about striking to not do business with a non-union employer, which isn't actually relevant. But either way, it's not clear to me that striking about who your employer does business with is a 'lawful' strike.
I also don't think this counts as a strike, at least the actions taken do not fully fall within the protections of a strike even if they were striking for a reason for which strikes are permitted. Disruptive protest like what this was isn't a legal strike.
Anyway I have no objection to them taking things to the NLRB, I just don't think they will win. I suspect google will settle by paying some or most of the terminated employees some severance or some other token gesture and will consider themselves lucky to be rid of activist employees.
The key difference here is that Google really wants the DoD contract and doesn’t care who’s on the losing side of the real battle.
The Google Walkout in the wake of Andy Rubin, David Drummond etc was far more disruptive to their business yet Google on paper felt they got a great deal on the severance packages of Rubin and Drummond ($0). Or at least Sundar was proud of how he cleaned up those messes.
This is a gross misreading of what the article actually said.
The real meat the article (as reflected very clearly in its original title, not the mangled caption that was unfortunately used for the post; and throughout the article body itself) is that Google apparently fired some 20+ employees who either weren't involved the protest at all, or whose alleged participation remains unclear.
As if the higher-ups got together and said to each other: "Ya know, 28 heads just isn't enough. We need to go out and bust some more, to you know, make a point. Plus there's that sound their skull makes when hitting the pavement. I just can't enough of it!"
Google might dispute this - then again Google lies about a lot of things. We'll see how the complaint process goes.
Either way you're going off on an ancilliary aspect of the article, not its main thrust.
> Google apparently fired some 20+ employees who either weren't involved the protest at all, or whose alleged participation remains unclear
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but there is deep information asymmetry here and google has all the advantage and must have anticipated that this would end up in discovery and litigation and that the records of the terminated people's employment would be subject to it. That means their chat history, their email history and office surveillance footage.
I have a hard time believing that google would have fired people where the sum of their recorded actions couldn't be reasonably construed to be disruptive.
I have a hard time believing that google would have fired people where the sum of their recorded actions couldn't be reasonably construed to be disruptive.
From the article:
“When I got there, there were probably 20-ish people sitting on the floor. I didn’t talk to any of them, I talked to folks who were standing up, passing out flyers, doing other roles,” he said, adding that the protesters were wearing matching T-shirts.
The worker then went back to his desk before returning to the protest around 5PM. “I chatted with them for maybe four minutes, like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re still sitting here! How’s it going?’” he said. Then, he finished the workday from a nearby couch. The worker says he returned to Google the following day without incident. That night, while at dinner, he got an email from Google saying he had been terminated.
Maybe that what's happened. Or maybe this person forgot to mention some details about something else they did at that day, due to a random lapse of memory without doubt. The point is we have no way to know, based on the words of one, very non-disinterested, side.
I wish we had a HN equivalent for the HR crowd because I find situations like this fascinating. HR is going to have to come up with a policy for how coworkers interact with protesters without getting fired because some level of interaction is necessary. If someone is in your office, you're going to need a "Hey, what's going on?", "Can you move over a bit so I can sit at my desk?", and "So what are you guys protesting?". A blanket ban on all interaction won't work because guys like this will get canned but by the same token, you can't have people toeing the line going in and out and pretending to interact so they can stay in the area without having their jobs threatened.
If you read the original article it specifically says he sought out the protestors.
> he went to the lounge on the 10th floor of Google’s New York City office around lunchtime to check out the protest.
Is a single google cafeteria/lounge employee being terminated for happening to be in the lounge when the protest happened? Of course not because that would be nonsense.
How is "checking out a protest" while on one's lunch break disruptive?
If you read the original article it specifically says he sought out the protestors
He was being "Googley" and curious, in other words. And got whacked for it.
From some random snippet attempting to define that nonsense term:
Googleyness is about embracing the unknown. Not just tolerating the unfamiliar, but really appreciating it. Celebrating finding yourself in a place you didn’t expect. Finding the joy in being surprised and dealing with unforeseen circumstances instead of resisting the reality you now occupy
His commentary isn't the exonerating statement you seem to think it is.
By his own admission he sought to join the protestors (he went to the lounge on the 10th floor of Google’s New York City office around lunchtime to check out the protest) and spent an indeterminate amount of time talking with protestors the first time around (I talked to folks who were standing up, passing out flyers, doing other roles)
Anyway it doesn't matter if he spent 40 minutes talking to them, four hours talking to them or 4 minutes talking to them
He went to "check out", and for a fraction of that time "talk with" the protestors, by the words you are quoting.
To "join the protestors" (implying some sort of direct participation) would of course be something entirely different, and in no way grounded in the description we have.
It doesn't matter 4 hours v. 4 min
An impartial observer of the situation would most likely strongly disagree with that take. In any case it certainly doesn't sound (from the description we have) that the net duration was anywhere near the former value. More likely it was around 20 min max.
So far we only have this one person's recollection of the events, where he has a huge bias towards trying to minimize his involvement.
Could be, who knows.
But from the weird semantic distortions you're attempting to lay over the words we do have from this guy -- it seems you're basically assuming he must be guilty of something awful, and therefore to be lying in some major way, also.
Reminds me of the Chinese social credit system. Having an opinion is terrible, talking with someone who has an opinion is arguably worse! That is how the disease spreads! The signal is that you should cover your ears and run away.
Or at least they say that. Which may or may not be true. Maybe google is lying, maybe they are lying. I imagine if NLRB asks, Google will be willing to provide the grounds for firing and we'd know who is the liar here.
Rule number one of being a rebel. Don’t do it at work. Protest all you want in the public streets where you have freedom of assembly. You do NOT have that freedom within a corporate office building. Regardless of employer. A few firings and maybe they’ll get the message to take it outside.
I empathize with people wanting to speak out over something they are passionate about. I do this often. Just know your venue and know your audience. Bridges take a while to build…
At almost every company I've worked over the years, I had to go through countless mandatory annual trainings that effectively says expressing opinions on non work related subjective political topics with coworkers/employer is not advisable, risky and can be grounds for termination in extreme cases.
Either these people genuinely believed there was scope for discussion, or believed their opinion/choice of topic is a PR minefield that their employer wouldn't dare take action or they really wanted to get fired.
I'm not from the US. So, unless I'm missing some cultural context, their actions like political activism at work (unless related to labor issues and laws) are unthinkable atleast in my country.
But a company isn’t a democracy. They don’t have a right to protest it.
If they as employees refuse to work (what they’re paid to do), then the employer has every right to fire them. They aren’t forming a union or something.
You’re saying that there are countries where there could be an employee that does all this stuff (refusing to din their day to day job) and potentially politicizes the public image of the company and the company couldn’t fire them?
Not talking about fairness or morality. Just legality.
It's a stretch to call it work related for the person protesting. If it were, the simple act of not working would be sufficient protest against the opposed work.
Those trainings are mandatory but usually done via an edutech platform that is basically just a QuickTime movie. Ethics, compliance, corporate policy, it’s just a 30 minute video you play while you do something else and then click the obvious multiple choice answers for 100%. Then forget everything in a week.
Lately it’s been those 2D animations using canned software and AI voice over because that’s cheaper than actually giving a damn. Animaker I believe.
United States. Every 6 months, mandatory courses exactly as GP described. If you refuse, you don't have a job. This is so absolutely normal for most tech and finance companies, and has been for years, that I'm utterly astonished that you believe the GP is making it up. Hell, even my fast food working niece has to do these courses!
Extremely common in corporate America. I had to click through more of them than I can count, luckily the service my employer did it through would let you skip to the end of the videos and blow through it faster. I don't understand why routine CYA being done is so hard to believe.
Well, if you aren't keen on doxxing yourself you shouldn't use arguments that require the reader to trust you. Internet is full of liars who claim to be everything from astronauts, to law professors, to IT employees who have gone through "countless mandatory annual trainings that effectively says expressing opinions on non work related subjective political topics with coworkers/employer is not advisable". I have not gone through "those annoying trainings" and since you can't offer a single shred of evidence for their existence...
I work for the US government. The trainings are real. I don’t remember this exact verbiage but similar for sure. The grounds of harassment basically constitute whatever the claimed victim feels to be so. For example, (and this is from training), saying goodmorning, commenting on hair, not saying good morning or not repeating back, and more. I just skip through but it’s an in depth asynchronous training supplemented by multiple live events.
Edit: and lest I be accused of harassment, good morning or -silence- to everyone according to your preference!
Ps Also our calendars are provided by the equal employment opportunity office and have helpful quotes each month on what is harassment and what is going to happen to you if you do it!
PPS in addition to multiple asynchronous trainings and live events and calendars it’s also plastered all over the buildings, bathrooms, and break rooms.
PPPS we also get emails regularly from top level secretaries and directors and I think there may be dedicated months as well to increase awareness.
Final: I sound bitter here but I agree harassment is bad but the level of psychological programming makes my stomach turn. Anyways yes it’s real.
Even if what you claim is correct (which I doubt and you aren't going to offer any evidence), it is irrelevant since you are working in the US and they are not. Moreover, their claim was about "expressing opinions on non work related subjective political topics" while yours is about what constitutes harassment. And this is perhaps what they experienced too. They are told that when someone says "hi" they should reply with "hi", but on the Internet this is blown way out of proportions to be about how every job they ever been at tried to stifle political speech.
Because I'm very used to well poisoners and their lies. As in this case, the liars can't offer any corroborating evidence and implicitly demands that you should disprove their lies. Which of course is impossible. Eventually, the lies become so entrenched because they aren't questioned that people like you become shocked when others disbelieve them.
Their actions achieved nothing of consequence. I don't see how that makes them "heroes", even from the point of view of someone that supports their views.
Sadly for them, I don't know any of their names, couldn't care who they are, and their protest will vanish from the news cycle in a few hours ... forever.
I suspect this is the same for everyone, even those who may be discussing Google's response.
So they may have wanted a "me me me" response, or they may have legitimately wanted to raise awareness, but it's a pretty large fail for a now strongly narrowed career path.
there's also the fact that google will just keep being used by nearly everyone. at the same time, for the now fired employees, having "was a google employee" in their resumes will help them land a new job
I think it really depends on the company. There are a lot of companies out there with a wide range of values. Some might even consider this a quality that they want in a candidate (it will certainly eliminate them from consideration for some companies though).
I doubt the majority of companies will consider it desirable even if they happen to be in political agreement with you --- because people's beliefs change over time.
That’s true! Some might even be more inclined to hire you based on your stance on the matter and that you protested. Good point. Just saying it’s not the best light to show why you were let go. I stick to the canned “We were over-resourced and so there were layoffs” is an easy blanket statement.
They accomplished me never responding to Google recruiter emails and informing others in my network to avoid Google where they can be fired for happening upon a protest at work.
I feel "Virtue signalling" isn't really fair when they have so much skin in the game here. That's evidence of sincerity rather than disingenuousness, agree or disagree with them.
Unless the definition of virtue signalling is so expansive as to be meaningless, where every act of protest which is not anonymous is virtue signalling.
The consequence of their actions is that they receive high social status from people with similar politics and Google makes zero changes to their contracts with Israel. And that was obviously going to be the result of these actions.
If you want to attribute their actions to a genuine desire to help the Palestinians, that is fine.
Then they shouldn't be suing imo. Suing implies they think they shouldn't have been fired, which means their risk was not intentional. So they're not heroes.
There's no philosophical dilemma here. Each participant in the conflict is using the tools at their disposal to get what they want.
The protestors want change from the company. So they protest. The company wants to shut them up. So they fire everyone.
The protestors still want change, now plus compensation. So they sue. Not suing makes no sense, as it concedes defeat and gets them no closer to their goals.
That's purely based on personal opinion though. I'm sure you could find people with the opposite opinion, that in a just world they would be able to go to work and do their job without having political debates forced on them.
Or alternately, one could easily say that in a just world a person would leave their when they disagree with the company rather than making a spectacle out of it.
You can find people who disagree with me about allowing mixed race couples, but it isn't meaningful to say that it's "purely based on personal opinion". You might as well also comment on how I used air to breath while writing it.
No one was stopped from going to work. There were no "political debates" going on, much less "forced" on people.
I swear you guys are just making stuff up to get mad at. I feel like there are real problems you could be worried about, like the people in Rafah. Instead I see a lot of chuffing about a gathering of noisy people. Whatever makes you feel good about your time on earth, I guess.
I had seen reports that there were people disrupting others trying to work in the office. I also expect that those protesting weren't talking about the weather, they would have been raising the issues they are there to protest.
Call it what you want I guess, but that is IMO stopping work and engaging in political debate.
I'm not sure why you reach for a straw man argument about air or mixed race couples, neither of those are relevant here at all and just make your argument weaker.
Edit: also to be clear, I'm not sure who the "you guys" you're referring to are and I'd rather not be lumped in with some larger group for my opinion on one specific situation. I'm also not looking to be angry about anything and am in no way angry about this. I can have opinions without it throwing my mood out of whack.
Most articles circulating widely have included quotes from Google that the protesters that have been fired were physically disrupting those at work. I didn't expect that to be a contentious reference without a source, but sure here's one - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/google-fires-more-worke...
To be clear, I'm well aware those are quotes from Google's PR department. I'm not taking them as true and was primarily building off other comments here. I think I covered that well by making sure I including "if true ..." caveats, not sure what else you'd want from me here other than to agree with you.
"We continued our investigation into the physical disruption inside our buildings on April 16, looking at additional details provided by coworkers who were physically disrupted,"
So that is what Google, one party to the conflict, claims. Not something independent sources have verified. I'm pretty sure the protestors deny that anyone was "physically disrupted". Edit: You have updated your comments. My point is that it is unfair to default to believing Google and disbelieving the protestors.
The only update I made above was an explicit "Edit:" note a couple comments up, but that was before you commented here. I haven't changed any context or points I raised, in case that was a concern.
And again to be clear, I'm intentionally not trusting only Google and I called that out when I included a source (as requested). I don't think I've been misleading or unfair here, I'm not quite sure what you're taking issue with at this point.
> I swear you guys are just making stuff up to get mad at. I feel like there are real problems you could be worried about, like the people in Rafah. Instead I see a lot of chuffing about a gathering of noisy people. Whatever makes you feel good about your time on earth, I guess.
This is a bit revealing. If you can't see anything but "us vs them" that's fine, but many people are a lot more objective and less trival than that. And that's why we'll win.
(Kidding about the last part. That's tribal lunacy.)
> Risking something for a protest is the whole point.
I can think of a number of protests that didn’t involve risking one’s career, livelihood, or life - that were pretty successful outside the workplace. Inside the workplace, it’s not a public venue and you don’t have the right to occupy offices and sit ins and disrupt work while expecting the company to pay you for that time.
Get realistic. They aren’t heroes. They are trespassers. Disruptive ex-employees that cost the company money. Now if they did this right outside Google offices on the streets, that’s a different story all together. That’s a public place. However, many states have at-will employment so if the company feels you no longer represent their interests, you’re done. Bye. Doesn’t matter the cause.
Sure, agree, but what about the employee in the article who wondered onto the 10th floor to check out the protest. That person wasn't actively protesting. And that person gets fired. That's not right.
Guilty by association. Again, at-will employment means they can justify it however they want to and it’s totally legal. Unless the individual is part of a union…
> This is a marked departure from the way Google has handled employee dissent in the past. In 2018, more than 600 Google workers signed an open letter opposing Project Dragonfly, an effort to build a search engine for China. As The Verge reported at the time, the petition began with an internally shared Google Doc, and all subsequent steps were also organized using Google products. Employees also urged Google to drop Project Maven, its contract with the US Department of Defense. That same year, over 20,000 Google employees staged a walkout in protest of the company’s handling of sexual harassment allegations against executives. [...]
> “There’s been a total change in the way Google responds to employees trying to have a voice in their workplace,” the fired software engineer said. “It’s night and day from the Google of even five, 10 years ago.”
This is the most interesting part of the article for me. Google's approach today, versus how it reacted to the backlash against Maven in 2018, reflects a very different company with a different attitude toward the opinions of its employees.
Did Google change, or was this protest substantially different in character?
In the reporting TFA links to about Maven I don't see any sign of employees staging disruptive protests on Google property. This is how Gizmodo describes that protest [0]:
> Google’s decision to provide artificial intelligence to the Defense Department for the analysis of drone footage has prompted backlash from Google employees and academics. Thousands of employees have signed a petition asking Google to cancel its contract for the project, nicknamed Project Maven, and dozens of employees have resigned in protest.
A petition signed by thousands and a bunch of resignations are very different than staging a sit in in an executive's office and refusing to leave when asked. And both of the protests referred to in the past (Maven and sexual harassment) seem to have had a much stronger base of support than the 20-50 people who participated in this.
Is it possible that Google is the same Google and these people have gotten caught up in unreasonable post-2020 expectations for what valid political expression in the workplace looks like?
I think the difference in the number of participants and base of support is material.
That said, the 2018 protests were definitely more disruptive than this one. 20,000 employees left their desks. [1]
Part of it might also be that several of the organizers of the 2018 walkouts left Google in the months following the walkouts (including Meredith Whittaker, who now runs the company behind Signal).
I think my original argument in the GP is wrong. The more I read about this topic, the more the true narrative seems like "after the 2018 walk-outs, Google took steps to ensure mass political action within the company like the action that tanked Maven would never happen again," and we're now seeing the results of those steps.
Walkouts are very different in character. It's a mini-strike, not an occupation. People voluntarily leave their jobs for a day, they don't sit in someone else's workspace and prevent them from doing theirs.
Sure, it's more disruptive to the company because the numbers are larger, but the damage done by each individual ends at not doing their work for the day. It's a statement of "this is what your company will look like if you don't address this" not "we're going to make a scene and hang out in your personal space".
This is a very selective and ahistorical definition of "strike". Strikes regularly block shipping lanes and scab workers from entering so they often prevent others from doing work on a job site.
I've personally seen AT&T employees go on strike but they were nothing like this. The employees on strike wouldn't go to work, and there were signs and a few people sitting at tables near the entrance to main office buildings in Atlanta, but nothing was blocked and the people there sure seemed more like they were paid by the union to be there and didn't really care at all.
> This is the most interesting part of the article for me. Google's approach today, versus how it reacted to the backlash against Maven in 2018, reflects a very different company with a different attitude toward the opinions of its employees.
I have two theories, both come with no warranty:
- Google is alarmed at how much "trust and safety" affected their ability to deliver LLMs, and is listening fractionally less to people of this political viewpoint
- Google has more existential threats and no more ridiculous ZIRP to coast along on, and so needs real income from customers that value it
- The Google department that owns this contract has some clout, and wanted to show its high-paying customer that it wasn't going to be swayed by the politics of its staff members
Google is very explicitly doing mass layoffs throughout the year. At this time, the company has every incentive to fire liberally. They have a quota of headcount to reduce through 2024, and firing for cause is better for morale (not to mention severance costs) than firing employees with good track records. If their layoff quota is 20% for the year, 20% of Google's employees broke the rules somehow, and Google fired them all, that'd be a great outcome for the company. That would mean they don't have to conduct mass layoffs, with all the morale and severance baggage that comes with.
>> Google's approach today, versus how it reacted to the backlash against Maven in 2018, reflects a very different company with a different attitude toward the opinions of its employees
I guess that's one possibility. Another possibility is that the owners and board of Google have a very different attitude towards protests in favor of Palestinians than the owners and board of Google had towards other protests in the past.
These protests aren’t in favour of Palestinians, they’re specifically against Israel, and empower and excuse a racist death cult that has taken over Gaza.
Dammit this is so dumb. Half of google employees I know are literally racist against Chinese people. This is about China vs Israel, not a change in approach.
> “There’s been a total change in the way Google responds to employees trying to have a voice in their workplace,” the fired software engineer said. “It’s night and day from the Google of even five, 10 years ago.”
Having a political voice is different than having a voice against sexual harassment at the workplace. Please don't mix things that don't belong together. Radically expressing your political voice during your job duties will get you fired in almost all companies. SV was very lax with this in the past. They just adjusted to how it is normally handled in corporate.
> Radically expressing your political voice during your job duties will get you fired in almost all companies
That very much depends on which political voice it is. If it's within approved voices, which lies very heavily to the left, then you'll be likely celebrated. But if you take it too far left - or, horrible dictu, a little to the right - then you'd get the boot. It's been like this 10 years ago and is now, it's just now the incessant push to the left is temporarily diverging from what Google approves, and also the tolerance for physically disruptive actions seems to thin out - while the left seems to get more and more bold, graduating from writing letters to physically disrupting work. The combination of non-approved cause and physical disruption is a sure recipe to get the boot, indeed.
What is the generalizable evidence you base this opinion on? Surely you must have access to a database of the real reasons someone was fired across all of tech?
Has the illiberal left not been smugly telling us "Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" when others lost their jobs? They hardly have any right to complain when they are hoist by their own petard.
A discussion on what is right is not a game between two football teams and you don't even know what my "side" is. Fwiw, feel free to look up my seven-year-old HN comments about James Damore.
That doesn't explain why the right - which has been just as smugly insisting that freedom of speech must mean freedom from consequences - doesn't seem to have a problem with it.
Because they have been deliberately excluded from participating in the discussion early on, so the only solace they have is watching the left eat their own. If the right doesn't get freedom, they'd at least enjoy their enemies getting the same treatment. It's a sad bargain but the only one available as it seems.
Almost everyone's support of freedom of speech and any freedom is conditional and self serving, that's just human nature. Why are you going out of your way to only complain about the "illiberal left?"
Because 1) conservatives rarely bother to speak up on HN; they know they are quite unwelcome here and 2) the illiberal left claims to be allied with liberals and that's clearly false.
Conservatives speak up all the time on HN, and weirdly enough they sound exactly like you do, down to the inability to refer to the left without a pejorative.
Conservatives ignorantly tend to refer to everything to the left of them as "liberals" even to behavior that is quite illiberal, so the distinction is important. But you're welcome to believe whatever you wish; it's a free country.
> as "liberals" even to behavior that is quite illiberal
That's actually the label the left has taken on themselves, blaming conservatives for it is really weird. Yes, the behavior of the modern left has little to do with the classical liberalism, but it's not the conservatives' fault that the left took on themselves this mantle and then failed to live up to it.
Freedom of speech is a protection from the government, not other citizens.
And I suspect the only reason people take this view is because the speech is something they agree with. Would you, for example, feel like Google was being totalitarian if Hitler Hank hosted a sit in protest against the company for hiring people of color and he was subsequently fired?
Yes, it does. The right to free speech is not a right if exercising it costs you your livelihood. The idea that freedom of speech only restricts the government's actions is typical American myopia. George Washington didn't copyright freedom of expression and the US constitution is not the end all to human rights.
> The right to free speech is not a right if exercising it costs you your livelihood.
This sort of free speech has never existed and frankly it would be preposterous for it to exist.
A company couldn't fire a salesperson that went around telling potential customers "Hey, our product is garbage you should use our competitors"? A state employee couldn't be fired for lying to the races they don't like "You don't qualify for this, sorry". An employee couldn't be fired for sexually harassing coworkers because "Welp, free speech, can't stop Bill from telling Jill how much he wants to have sex with her".
If we take this right to its natural conclusion, it would preclude other rights like the freedom of association.
You have it backwards. There's a huge backlash when somebody's fired for being racist, or homophobic, or transphobic. Now anti-authoritarian protestors are being doxxed, fired and arrested; yet I haven't heard a peep from those people who "believe in free speech."
The issue with free speech historically or currently worldwide is that governments can silence, jail or kill you. It’s a civic issue, not business one.
Maybe a government can find a "legal" way to accomplish those illicit goals, which gives them an edge. But powerful entities like huge companies don't necessarily need to contort the law to accomplish their illicit goals. There are ways to launder responsibility for them through 3rd parties. Protecting people from the government itself is good, but not sufficient in the era of trillion dollar multinational companies.
It seems quite strange to attribute the actions of a group individuals to some nebulous force - "the left". It's weird to see such reductionism to a binary axis for something as complex as the intersection of politics, commerce and personal values.
> SV was very lax with this in the past. They just adjusted to how it is normally handled in corporate.
What's remarkable is that SV allowed protests against US, china, russia, anyone really. But protest against israeli war crimes is where they drew the line.
SV, media, congress, everyone supported violent protests that burned down cities. But peaceful protests in college campuses against israeli genocide is where they send in the storm troopers.
In china, they send in the storm troopers if you protest communist rule. It's interesting what we send the storm troopers for. Food for thought.
> They were fired for blocking a senior executives private office.
That must be it. That must be why the media, congress, colleges, etc are all cracking down on protests. Where were they a few years ago when 'peaceful protests' were 'peacefully' burning down cities? It says something when both MSNBC and Fox News agree on cracking down on protests.
I feel like I have to push back against the idea that it is "radical" to object to your labor being used in a genocide.
Am I the only one that feels like this is a fairly straightforward moral issue, and one I would expect to -- at the very least -- be allowed to express myself about. I also think the resolution of the moral issue is fairly straightforward, but I accept that there will be multiple opinions there. Still, people supporting Israel have not been fired, and supporting a genocide is -- in my mind -- a much more radical political position than objecting to one.
They're free to leave and should state their reasons. What they're not free to do is disrupt the mission of the company and feel entitled to do so without any consequences. These people weren't fired because they answered some question incorrectly on a mandatory survey. They laid on the floor, prevented people from doing their work and harassed people making many feel uncomfortable. When you see someone like that behaving at your business, do you stop and think "let me hear them out"
Please reread the article, if only the first sentence, which is helpfully formatted in bold type. You missed some crucial details about who was doing what among the fired people.
Getting publicly fired and then using your labor rights and bureaucratic processes to draw out the issue seems like a much more effective form of protest than just quitting. Their tactics are good here.
I doubt that was their plan, since if it was going to go down like this, then you might as well have the cops drag you out the building.
Protests don’t work if they can disperse of you that easily or cordon you off to a small block. If only a few of you get arrested and the rest of you disperse, it won’t work. If one of you get arrested, all of you should try to get arrested since they can’t fill up the jails with everyone.
If you are not going to go all the way then don’t bother with this shit.
I don’t agree with the Jan 6 riots, but they mostly followed through lol. That’s pretty much how you have to do it, and if you have a really good cause (e.g something not retarded like defending trump), you’d have a lot of support.
College protesters need to straight up super glue themselves to the campus honestly if they really want to do this. Yes, actually glue on bare skin to surface. Then America can watch as the fire departments remove students one by one off the walls of the campus live lol.
Yeah fair, I also figure they mostly weren't expecting to get fired. But once you have been you might as well use the system as fully as you can, eke something out of it.
Using the process seems like ‘abuse of process’ in cases like this where the protesters clearly violated the law and their obligations to their counterparty (in this case their employer).
Well, whether they did that is not completely clear? That's what the process is there to decide right.
But in any case and far more importantly protests have goals they want to achieve and being a pain in the ass is absolutely a valid tactic. Protest movements have rarely accomplished their aims by acting fully within the social preferences of their opponents.
The problem with this logic is that I’m not sure you’d want it applied when the tables are turned. How would you feel if Israel-supporting lawyers started filing frivolous nuisance suits against these protesters? Still fair game?
Keep in mind that these junk suits (in both directions), have negative impacts on other people trying to access the justice system for legitimate reasons.
It strikes me wrong to call this a genocide as a survivor of an actual genocide. So i have maybe a narrower definition of the word but i feel obligated because of my experiences to remind to being very careful with this word
Good thing the lawyer brigade is helping Israel stay just just just barely below the technical definition of a genocide. Google can rest easy knowing til this date one apparent body of justice has blessed the actions as not technically genocide. Certainly the employees should continue to keep their heads down and keep calm because so far its not technically genocide. Judgements based on evidence dated til Dec. 2023, new evidence dating prior could revise genocidal status
- The above is a satire. But come on what are we arguing about?
We are arguing about the meaning of words, especially words thrown around as libels to try and delegitimize justified self defense.
I'm sorry if the facts don't agree with your desires for something to be true. War is terrible and civilians die in all wars, especially those in urban areas where one party tunnels underneath civilian infrastructure to protect themselves while leaving civilians exposed to fire.
It is not libel to say that the ICJ's statement is a strong indication that a genocide is ongoing. What Joan Donoghue says is that, technically, there is no ruling on the "plausibility of genocide claims". Which is a technical legal claim separate from the sentiment in the ruling. Yes, the ICJ has not made a ruling on the plausibility because the legal process has not come far enough to make such a ruling.
This does not mean that the ruling does not indicate that the court thinks a genocide is occurring.
If you simply look at the definition of a genocide and the facts on the ground, you should quite easily come to the conclusion that this is a genocide and it should end -- and that Palestinians should have legal rights to live on their indigenous land and have human rights. This is not a radical position in my mind, this should be the status quo of a person with a normative moral compass.
"It is not libel to say that the ICJ's statement is a strong indication that a genocide is ongoing"
"This does not mean that the ruling does not indicate that the court thinks a genocide is occurring."
You've seen the video and are continuing to disagree with what the ICJ president herself has explicitly said. If you want to claim that Israel is committing genocide, you're free to do so, but don't continue to lie to yourself or others about what the ICJ has said now that you have been corrected.
"If you simply look at the definition of a genocide and the facts on the ground, you should quite easily come to the conclusion that this is a genocide..."
If you simply look at Israel government's military capabilities and the facts on the ground, should quite easily come to the conclusion that genocide is not the goal.
The Israel government's intention is clearly to kill enemy soldiers, even if it means killing civilians in the process. This is the same attitude that most countries have adopted in times of war.
The Allies did horrendously unethical things (like fire bombing millions of civilians) during WW2 but even that wasn't genocide.
Claiming that Israel's government is committing war crimes is a much more reasonable argument. It may not be true but it's not obviously false, the way the genocide claim is.
Ask yourself what Israel would do if every member of Hamas was willing to march out to a battlefield and meet them head-to-head in a large scale battle. Would Israel keep sending bombs at houses or would they target that battlefield?
Most people could be convinced that the right-wing Israel government is being unnecessarily brutal and hamfisted in their response to the Oct 7 attacks. If the goal was to convince more people to pressure Israel, that would be possible.
But the insistence upon specific word use ("genocide") is a transparent attempt at signalling in-group and out-group status. This has been a common pattern among political extremists for a long time. There's always some kind of rationalization about why its important but it's never the real reason.
Being divisive is the point.
Just like Trump's adherents signal their in-group status by pretending the 2020 Election was "stolen" so do the extreme left's adherents signal their in-group status by claiming Israel is committing a "genocide".
In both cases, the goal is not to actually convince people of something that is obviously false. The purpose is to have a loyalty test that can be used to differentiate friend and foe.
I'm not arguing about the current facts, facts change and I think employees shouldn't be timid when they are feeling uncomfortable about the fruits of their labor. Whether or not this is technically genocide is hilariously off-topic for the thread at large and serves to create a narrative that one's actions must be classified as genocide to reach the level of justified employee outcry. You obviously are free to quibble about what is or is not genocide and I'm free to ridicule it with satire.
I'd rather not open this sensitive topic, all i will say is that the genocide i've been a survivor of was handled and ruled by the ICJ as a genocide a long time ago.
Genocide survivalship isn’t something it’s passed though generations, otherwise pretty much every person on Earth is a genocide survival.
If you want to get technical, sure the UN didn’t put the rubber stamp on it, but I think the more important thing is a strip of land where most buildings are reduced to dust, dozens of thousands of people are dead and millions starving. Even putting aside the morality for a second, what is the practical objective of all this?
Please do cursory research [1] before confidently asserting that the only living survivors of genocides must be impossibly old and confidently leveling personal attacks against people claiming as such by calling them liars.
Acting on them also has less of an impact on the bottom line, and doesn't sour the company's connections to Israeli or US military and defense industries.
Corporations tend to act morally only when doing so aligns with their profit motives.
Google has explicitly denied that Project Nimbus has anything to do with defense or military use.
You can disbelieve this, of course, and I assume the internal protesters did disbelieve it or at least thought the tech was dual-use (I don't know what Nimbus actually is). But assuming it's true, and also assuming for the sake of argument that Israel is guilty of genocide, I think it raises an interesting question: do otherwise genocidal governments still need and deserve the right to buy civilian infrastructure to support their own people?
I think they do, and that depriving them of that infrastructure could itself rise to the level of a crime (if taken to an extreme).
> Still, people supporting Israel have not been fired
I've worked in past with people who were very passionate Gaza supporters. And they received nothing but praise, but their work may have supported people involved with Oct 7th massacres. Should they be fired too?
I don't see how that relates to my point. My point is that repercussions are happening to one side of the issue: those opposing genocide and apartheid. Two things I was sure of everyone could agree on are some of the most horrendous crimes against humanity you can commit.
The genocide has been ongoing for multiple decades, Israel routinely bombs civilians in Gaza, and any Palestinians living in Israel have essentially no political rights and effectively fewer property rights than other people. They have color coded passports and car license plates, and are easy to target by Zionists. Zionists get tried in civil court for committing crimes, and Palestinians living on the e.g. West Bank get tried in criminal court for any offense. An offense can include walking on a certain off-limit street if you are a Palestinian (which is not off-limit to Israelis or tourists).
Israel has killed so many more people than any Palestinian resistance forces that were engaged in October 7th (Hamas, communists, etc.), so trying to center the discussion on October 7th is fairly ridiculous.
Look at these charts and tell me with a straight face that Palestinians are the violent ones:
Any Palestinians living in Israel have essentially no political rights
Simply false, and in fact rather insulting to the large numbers of non-Jewish citizens of Israel who do chose to participate in the political process.
Also you seem confused about the restrictions that apply to Palestinians in the OT versus those living in Israel proper.
This kind of muddled reasoning is definitely not helpful to understanding the plight of these people who so you are supposedly so concerned about and empathic towards.
Just pointing out your arguments could be applied to any war, e.g. Japan and USA in WW2: Japan lost magnitudes more people than the US, though it's really hard to sell that the US was committing genocide, especially given how aggressive and nasty Japan was when given free reign. Lots of parallels here.
It is outlined in an 85 page filing to the ICJ—the world highest court—how this is a genocide.
Your rebuttal is not a rebuttal, nobody is claiming that “every bad thing or territorial war, even of conquest, is a genocide”. People are claiming, and are being backed in said claim by several governments, international organization, the UN, and the world court, that this particular thing is a genocide.
This is one of the things that is easy to fact check. Usually you provide a source when you are making a specific claim based on an event or research e.g. “somebody said this” - “here is a link to the quote”, or “research has shown” - ”here is a link research”. However I made a general claim about a well documented subject. But very well, I made the claim, so it is up to me to prove it.
I cited an 85 page filing at the ICJ, and claimed that several governments, international organization, the UN, and the World Court has claimed this particular thing is a genocide. If you google “Gaza genocide” you will find all these claims in the first page of results. You may even find the 85 page filing (but in case you don’t, here is a link[1]).
There is a whole Wikipedia article dedicated to this subject[2], my claims can all be found there, particularly in the section titled: Statements by political organisations and governments. Finally, if you still in doubt, I’ll give you one more source, in particular where the UN is claiming that: “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met” can be found in a report by the UN special rapporteur on the situation in Palestine[3].
The comments back then were very supportive of google employees protesting against china's censorship. While the top comments here seem to be against google employees protesting israeli war crimes.
It is because not everyone sees Israel as committing war crimes. I'm not looking in getting into a debate about it, I don't think this is the appropriate thread and do not want to run afoul of HN guidelines. But to treat your question as if it is serious and sincere (i.e. not a rhetorical question) the answer is because many do not see Israel as committing war crimes but basically everyone agreed China was censoring. I'd also add that censorship can be a particularly sensitive topic the tech community is largely more polarized against than the wider country, whereas weapons of war are viewed by some as valid defensive work. Basically, nerds care about censorship disproportionately. And of course, opinions on both China and Israel would be baked into this too.
Again, not looking to get into the actual substance of these points here, merely answering your question for why large amounts of people see these as different.
While true, i think this answer misses the hypocrisy of the situation.
1. The same people who were supportive of the previous protests, are today's people who suggest "don't do it at work".
2. Regardless of whether Israel is commiting war crimes or not, if one is to be consistent, they must advocate that both the China censorship and genocide protests be done outside of work.
3. The main takeaway here is the bias (justified or not), and disappoint and disturbing hypocrisy in the reaction to the aforementioned protest
>Hundreds of Google employees, upset at the company’s decision to secretly build a censored version of its search engine for China, have signed a letter demanding more transparency to understand the ethical consequences of their work.
>Google fired 28 employees in connection with sit-in protests at two of its offices this week...Some of them occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian until they were forcibly removed by law enforcement.
I understand in the China case they didn't actually physically occupied workspace and prevented others from doing their work? They wrote a letter. I think there's a bit of a difference between writing a letter and barging into your bosses office and telling them you're not leaving until they do what you want.
This has nothing to do with "a few years", and has everything to do with Israel being perceived as a US ally and China being perceived as an enemy. Basically nothing has changed.
Part of it is likely to be how the US government will react. If Google is seen as anti-China that is fine, if they are seen as anti-Israel they might lose important contracts.
If you look at it in terms of AI, I think it makes more sense.
Google the information enabler was a clear benefit to mankind. Pretty easy to be aspirational there. Happy fun liberal improve the world thinking. Expand participation and information awareness.
Google the surveillance tool and AI merchant for governments and corporations for leveraging total surveillance? .... Yeah. But that's where the bucks are.
Google has clearly moved very far into full enshittimonification of its information. It needs compliant obedient workers to shut up and make it money. Alphabet the big ideas has pretty much totally failed, the only thing succeeding is surveillance: Android and Search. Google doesn't need free, liberal, smart thinkers. It needs order takers.
Googler protests in the past have typically been walk-outs and other outdoor gatherings. This protest took place within the offices. Some of the protestors occupied senior executives' offices for many hours, and had to be removed by the police. Some of the protestors also streamed their protest from within the offices of the notoriously confidentiality-obsessed company.
I don't buy the narrative that Google is cracking down on employee activism. It seems more like the activists in this instance went too far and were dealt with accordingly.
I think it's fair to say that Google is cracking down. They did tolerate activities like this previously, but came down like a hammer on this. It seems like they are setting a precedent and giving fair warning to anyone else thinking of doing something similar. Things like this can be viral, as seen with the college protests. And the more enabled they are, the worse they get, as seen with Columbia.
And to be fair there has been a big shift in the market for tech workers. There was a sort of indispensable aura that protected tech employees before that just isn't there any more. People who think this sort of thing wouldn't yield a rapid firing are living in the past.
I find it rather incredible. They end it by announcing that they should all be reinstated because they "did nothing wrong". They repeatedly talk as if they expected just to have their "concerns heard", to get a warning, etc.
As an aside, what is with the insane, anti-HN moderation in here? Rational, constructive comments are greyed out because someone's raging bias is countered.
> I find it rather incredible. They end it by announcing that they should all be reinstated because they "did nothing wrong". They repeatedly talk as if they expected just to have their "concerns heard", to get a warning, etc.
Yeah. This is true "privilege" speaking -- they don't seem to realize how fortunate they were to be in their positions in the first place.
Companies employ you because it's a good deal for them. If you're lucky, you find a place where it is a good deal for you too. Protesting and disrupting work changes that calculus for the company. It's no longer a good deal for them, and the unsurprising result is that they don't want to employ such people or hire them back.
Or it can be seen as an extension of the protest, continuing to lash out at Google for making sociopathic decisions (from their perspective) and using all the tools at their disposal to continue to make being evil less attractive.
> This is true "privilege" speaking -- they don't seem to realize how fortunate they were to be in their positions in the first place.
This is an extreme assumption on your part.
> Companies employ you because it's a good deal for them. If you're lucky, you find a place where it is a good deal for you too. Protesting and disrupting work changes that calculus for the company. It's no longer a good deal for them, and the unsurprising result is that they won't want to hire such people back.
Everytime workers do something collectively there's a dozen people in these threads saying the same thing, as if it's some sort of revelation.
Sometimes people do things regardless of what's "expected" to be done to them, hoping for reason and empathy to prevail. That's not a sin and being snide about it isn't helpful.
It's not. As I said, that's what I take from a video where a string of people had some of the best paying jobs available to any kind of worker, and at one of the most significant companies in the world right now, but don't seem to appreciate how fortunate they were to be in that situation or that they are replaceable.
> hoping for reason and empathy to prevail
"Reason" is what will get them in trouble here. A reasonable company is unlikely to keep or re-hire disruptive employees when it has other options, and boy does it have other options right now in this tech labor market.
> being snide about it isn't helpful.
I'm not being snide. They have every right to stand up for what they believe in, and there is something noble in that regardless of whether you agree with their view. I'm just remarking on how these individuals don't seem to realize what they had and what they've likely lost.
> Sometimes people do things regardless of what's "expected" to be done to them, hoping for reason and empathy to prevail. That's not a sin and being snide about it isn't helpful.
Of course its not a sin, I think the point here is that people need to be really clear of the risks before taking such an aggressive moral stance. Depending on empathy and reason to prevail while protesting on personal opinion is a crap shoot, chances are the people on the other side could have different moral views or different goals to reason about.
That's absolutely not to say that people shouldn't protest, only that purposely protesting in a disruptive way should be expected to have a bad outcome and push back from the other side. When the other side is on the winning side of the power imbalance that likely means you lose. If the goal is to draw a line in the sand that can still be a win, but if the goal is to make a show out of it with no consequences, well that probably won't work out.
> I think the point here is that people need to be really clear of the risks before taking such an aggressive moral stance
Every thread like this, from now to the first time I visited HN so long ago, is filled with a hundred of the same comment that gets some weird satisfaction off presuming that people haven't thought out their actions. It's not unique, it's not interesting, it's not helpful, and frankly it's kind of insulting.
Its a reasonable assumption that the person in question here didn't think it through if they're filing complaints over the firing. If you disagree with the company you work for and choose to protest disruptively at the office, and know that could lead to being fired, why file a complaint when that happens? And when filing the complaint, is the goal really to get your job back?
At least for me, I can't speak for others here, its a combination of either not thinking it through or purposely making a spectacle out of themselves just to make a spectacle. For better or worse, I don't have much patience for people making a loud show of themselves and appearing to act irrationally (ex: protesting the company you work for, acknowledging you may get fired, getting fired, then filing a complaint presumably to get your job back?).
In the video I link at the base of this thread multiple participants declare that they did not expect to get fired.
They don't call their firing consequences, they call it retaliation. They end the video by declaring that they should all be reinstated because they did nothing wrong.
Loads of internet posters very strongly and emotionally declared that they all knew that they'd be fired, including in this thread. That they were professional martyrs who heroically gave extremely desirable jobs for a cause with eyes wide open, and of course they knew what would happen. But every bit of evidence from the actual participants betrays the opposite.
And we're going to see the same sort of rhetoric as college students start getting expelled, their academic careers ruined. You'll have the former students on one side crying and gnashing about how unfair and unearned the consequences are, and on the other side third-parties cheering on their self-sabotage as heroic.
I don't have any direct connection to Google to really know what happened, only going off what I've seen online. If some protesters were disrupting the office, and those just trying to do their jobs, they should have expected repercussions. Its on them if they believed themselves powerful enough to do that with no repercussions.
A huge challenge in general is that a vast majority of us, myself included, only get fed headlines online and assume we know the whole story. I try to caveat it with "if this is true, ..." to try and help control that unknown.
What's the difference in retaliation and consequences?
IMO it'd have to be something related to whether the response from Google could have reasonably been expected given the rules, employee agreement, etc. If the protests were disrupting others from getting their job done, that seems pretty reasonable to me personally. Otherwise I guess it would come down to how strict Google has historically been for people ducking out of work without notice (that's the best I could see Google claiming if it really was a peaceful protest / sit-in).
> I don't buy the narrative that Google is cracking down on employee activism.
Seriously? As somebody who's followed this stuff closely there's loads of historical precedent here for assuming exactly that. Including with NLRB and retaliation from other "good kinds of protests".
Either way, they're not coming back into the building, and Google would probably rather fight a law suit than dealing with these people personally ever again.
Extremely unsurprising that they got fired and it seems somewhat far fetched. If your employer works as a military contractor for a state which actions you oppose so much that you engage in a protest, then obviously you can not work there.
If you vehemently oppose US military involvement in the world you should not work at Raytheon. It simply is an arrangement which can not work, neither you, nor your employer should be interested.
The story here isn't the people who were fired for protesting. That's fine. The story is the people fired for watching the protest or being vaguely associated with the people in the protest.
Anyone can sue or complain about anyone else. It doesn't mean that they will get anything out of it. In this particular case, I'm seeing many people who support their message speaking against what they did.
I had a similar moral conflict at a workplace and I dealt with it by resigning. Despite my outrage, I can't imagine occupying the office of my boss as an acceptable move. It's not illegal for my company to do business I disagree with, and if I don't like it, I leave. Simple.
Resigning under protest isn't really effective unless you are difficult to replace. Even in that scenario, you can almost certainly "protest" more effectively by speaking out and seeking targeted changes and then ultimately resigning or forcing them to fire you when they don't change. Protesting is at its core being an un-ignorable pain in the ass until a problem gets fixed. Resigning is pretty ignorable, especially if your reasons for doing so are not clear.
Given the NLRB's position on "Google's ideological echo chamber," - the likelihood that the NLBR would rule in their favor seems non-existent given their strong defense of corporate rights to punish speech at work.
At will employment doesn't matter here. Even with at-will employment
it is illegal to fire employees for some reasons. For example, it's generally against the law to fire employees for discussing their work conditions.
I think the employees will have a difficult case here, but it is conceivable that some of them might. For example I could see the NLRB ruling in favor of an employee who was fired after for expressing concern about a project with Israel, but I think the employees who staged a sit-in probably don't have a case.
Well you can't fire people for political reasons. It's a protected category. So the crux of it will likely depend on if there's similar protests from opposing viewpoints that were not dealt with similarly. Eg. If there were any counter protestors at the same event that weren't also fired that's a reasonably clear cut case of firing a group for political views.
Political affiliation is not a protected class. California law does restrict employers from punishing employees for their political activities, but this generally applies to activities done outside of work.
> where the most prominent voices in the movement support Hamas
I suppose that depends on your definition of "the movement". But I am close friends with one of the activist leaders for divesting from Israeli government-linked companies on my university campus—and they're Jewish. So I'm personally skeptical of the scaremongering propaganda
There was that one American political youtuber back a couple years ago who said something along the lines of "America Deserved 9/11". Peoples ethnicities or places of origin have very little to do with how their opinions are viewed.
If you don't support violence against civilians, but you support a group who has many objectives, and one just so happens to be the desire to kill Jewish civilians, you actually do support the violence against civilians.
There are around 16 million Jews in the world, I'm sure you can find one or two to support more or less anything. But the Uncle Tom/Kapo analogy doesn't work; there are no Jews under Hamas rule (other than the hostages ofc) so there is no incentive for any of them to betray their people in that way.
Of course there is an incentive. You get to reap social capital and get high on your own perceived holiness. Do you think someone like Norman Finkelstein would be so popular if he wasn't a Jew? Or Candace Owens black?
The Muslim world. People like Finkelstein are treated like celebrities in Qatar.
Leftist circles, like the student protesters we like talking about. Have you not heard "this is what decolonization looks like"? Why do you think many lefties refuse to condemn Hamas?
The anti-west/anti-american masses. This is the perfect opportunity for Russians and Chinese to undermine the west by promoting token whities, like Jackson Hinkle.
These are often all the same person.
Edit: Not to mention the growing undercurrents of antisemitism in western countries from the right wing and other minorities.
> where the most prominent voices support Hamas and what they did on Oct 7th
This is a pretty unsupportable take from where I'm standing. Maybe we are in separate bubbles, but very little of the stuff I've seen/read is _in support of_ Oct 7th. Vast majority of voices condemn the attacks, request immediate ceasefire and immediate return of hostages. I know that line so well because of how much I've heard it.
Saying you condemn Oct 7th but you support the overall cause to free palestine is like saying you condemn Russians murdering Ukrainian civilians but you support the overall cause to retake the territory. Doesn't really work like that.
Nah. Google is free and clear on this. It sounds like they have something in their policy about disruption of business. If the employee signed the contract, he/she is SOL on this.
> where the most prominent voices in the movement support Hamas
This is absolutely not true. This is a perception being spread by the media who don't like the attention being drawn towards the US' complicity in potential war crimes, but has no basis in reality. In reality many protesters themselves are Jewish.
Of course its true. If the protests slogan was "2 state solution", then your point would be valid. But its pretty clear that "Free Palestine" is all about the Hamas cause. And if you support Hamas cause, you implicitly support what they did on Oct 7th. You don't get to just conveniently say you don't support the terrible parts when someone points them out. If you wanna be morally consistent at least.
And if you do care, there is more depth to it. For example, you can be objectively correct in saying that all of of the protestors are also implicitly anti LBGTQ and anti women rights. If hypothetically Hamas had their way tomorrow where they managed to free Palestine (which would basically involve murdering every single Jew from the river to the sea), within less then a year you would hear about death sentences for homosexuals, and reduction of rights for women.
You can even take it another level and say that if you are Muslim in todays age, you essentially align yourself with core ideology of Islam. Saudi Arabia, which is arguably the center for all things Islam, is still is under Sharia law, with homosexuality being illegal. So if you are ok with someone in US being Muslim but being totally pro LBGTQ rights, then you should also be ok with people openly identifying as Nazis and wearing Nazi uniforms with swastikas, cause they can easily claim that they don't condone all the bad parts of the Nazi party, they just like all the good parts like restoring German economy after WW1.
Protestors being Jewish have nothing to do with it either. The mentality of the people who protest is purely ideological, nobody actually cares about what reality is and what the optimal solution is, people are just looking to attach themselves to a cause for self validation, and as a result end up with a bunch of cognitive dissonance that they don't even realize they have.
And yes, I realize that people are morally allowed to be hypocrites, because we don't have a rigid framework for each own thoughts that everyone must follow. However if you grant yourself the right to be a hypocrite in this sense, then you shouldn't complain when you get fired from your job, even if its for a wrong reason.
> Google “retaliated against approximately 50 employees and interfered with their Section 7 rights by terminating and/or placing them on administrative leave in response to their protected concerted activity, namely, participation (or perceived participation) in a peaceful, non-disruptive protest that was directly and explicitly connected to their terms and conditions of work,” the complaint reads.
Seems very thin to call on the NLRA here. The "protesters" stated goals were to disrupt work even for people not a member of the non-union (therefore not a strike) which is not a protected activity. Moreover, were any of these employees or any members of the minority union actually working on the Israeli contracts they objected to? While you can protest against your job duties under the NLRA (or job duties of your collective union members) I don't see that you can protest against company functions which aren't job duties you or your class aren't a part of.
If the workers had just walked off the job and peacefully and non-disruptively protested in front of the building and refused to go back to their job until they (or other members of the minority union) had their job duties modified so they were not working on those projects and google had fired them, that seems like it would violate the NLRA.
Anyway this seems like some fun FAFO. I wonder how many of the people who got fired were even members of the non-union before the "protest".