Google has been dealing with a more active labor force this past year. In February, it was forced to end its mandatory arbitration practices because of employee demand. In November, reports of union-busting practices by the tech giant came to the forefront after the company allegedly fired four employees in retaliation for their attempts to organize. These moves came after Google employees staged protests over the company’s relationship with DHS and ICE detention centers, and for numerous allegations of employee sexual harassment, as well as in response to the firing of employees. Now Kathryn Spiers, who worked for Google’s Platform Security program and was just recently promoted due to her excellence on the job, has been fired, and she has responded with a detailed narrative of events.
Spiers writes that she had been an employee of Google for the past two years, working on Chrome, Google’s internet browsing application. Her job included the creation of code to provide pop-up notifications to Google workers on their browsers, ranging from security alerts to entertainment.
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Spiers says that during her tenure at Google she received high performance ratings and even a promotion two months ago. But Google’s satisfaction with her job performance seems to have disappeared after she wrote code that created a pop-up when employees visited the website of Google’s newly hired consulting firm, IRI Consultants. That pop-up said, “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.”
Spiers says she wrote the few lines of code in response to news that Google had somewhat clandestinely hired the firm, a well-known anti-union company. The news of the hiring also coincided with Google being “forced to post a list of rights,” and Spiers wanted to remind her fellow employees of those rights. She writes that these kind of pop-ups and reminders have always been normal in her former workplace. “For example, someone changed the default desktop wallpaper during the walkout last year so that the Linux penguin was holding a protest sign,” Spiers writes. She says that there really hasn’t ever been any aggressive action taken against someone, to her knowledge, for creating an internal pop-up.
However, for her pop-up reminding employees that they have rights, Spiers was suspended at the beginning of Thanksgiving week, on the same day that Google allegedly retaliated and fired four employees involved in labor-organizing activities. What came next, Spiers writes, was something of an illegal witch hunt:
They also dragged me into three separate interrogations with very little warning each time. I was interrogated about separate other organizing activities, and asked (eight times) if I had an intention to disrupt the workplace. The interrogations were extremely aggressive and illegal. They wouldn’t let me consult with anyone, including a lawyer, and relentlessly pressured me to incriminate myself and any coworkers I had talked to about exercising my rights at work.
At the end of the second week of December, Spiers was told she was being terminated. In all of these cases, Spiers’ included, Google has claimed that the employees fired were violating “security policies.” Spiers and the other employees targeted by Google say these are bogus claims.