> Well, for one, retaliation against labor organizing is illegal under federal law.
These people are not attempting "labor organizing". They are putting on a few of the trappings of labor organizing, like drawing up lists of demands, but without doing any of the hard work that requires actually organizing a union.
In the United States, a company's employees decide whether to form a union by holding a referendum by secret ballot. Unions then elect their representatives through a similar process.
Google's activists are not attempting to form a traditional union. They know that they are deeply unpopular and would lose any fair secret ballot election in which they were on the ballot. The activists believe that by playing pretend-union, they can gain all the influence of a real union without the accountability and risk. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Do you really believe that these people are enhancing Google's image in the eyes of the general public? You have no idea how many potential employees Google is losing due to the company having acquired a reputation as an extreme ideological environment.
> A lot of people get mistreated at Google (TVCs, women, people of color, trans people)
It's true that TVCs are not employees, but this different in status does not amount to mistreatment.
The groups you mention are not mistreated at Google. In fact, the company bends over backward to recruit and accommodate them. I challenge you to name one policy that disadvantages women, people of color, or trans people. These persistent claims of mistreatment are in fact cynical attempts to achieve unearned status and special protection from normal rules that govern the company.
These people are not whistleblowers. They are instead hard-left political activists falsely claiming whistleblower protection as cover for activity that harms the company.
For years now, these people have been bullying the company into advancing hard-left political positions instead of serving the company's founding mission. They have created a climate of fear for anyone who disagrees with their extreme political positions, and they have almost certainly violated their employment contracts by leaking confidential information to the press. Their friends in HR protect them.
They appear to engage in activism full-time on the company's payroll according to documents they themselves have posted.
They talk constantly about "Google's values", which they twist into claims that the company has already decided to support their political positions. They demand that Google give up billions of dollars in business by abandoning product lines and refusing to serve huge portions of the population. For example, one of them demanded that one business disable a key component that drives a lot of revenue, calling the situation an "extremism emergency". To this person, the negative impact would have been irrelevant. These demands never stop. They call them "ethics".
Any functioning company would have fired these people a long time ago. Google leadership is full of cowards.
The author's bias is obvious. She's not even trying to create an impression of objectivity. The activists and this article's author are congratulating each other all over Twitter. Besides, the article contains nuggets like this:
> Meanwhile, there’s not a company in the sector that isn’t grappling at some level with the ways bro-gramming culture has made tech a toxic space for women and employees of color.
Anyone who uncritically invokes this frame is waging culture war, not describing it. This article is activist propaganda masquerading as neutral reporting.
Agreed. Management needs to fire these people. If they sue, great: Google's ensuing victory will create a precedent that workplace protections do not extend to unbounded activism that employees falsely claim is whistleblowing.
Someone posted preliminary sit-in attendance numbers. Attendance ranges from 50-150 per office in the larger offices. Anecdotally, I've seen very little discussion and energy this time compared to the walkout. Back then, one couldn't walk 20 feet without hitting some kind of exhortation to join the walkout. This time, more people might find out about this sit-in through this HN story than through internal channels.
The low visibility and low attendance aren't the result of any kind of management repression. I think it's a real change in sentiment. Most people don't care about this affair. Among people who are paying attention, there's a fair amount of internal skepticism and outrage fatigue. The small core group of habitual protesters is as active as ever, but they've struggled to come up with concrete evidence that substantiates their "systemic retaliation" narrative, and it feels like they've lost the hearts and minds of the public. It's telling that the main mailing list that these people use to communicate has enacted strict moderation policies that effectively ban debate and disagreement.
These people are not attempting "labor organizing". They are putting on a few of the trappings of labor organizing, like drawing up lists of demands, but without doing any of the hard work that requires actually organizing a union.
In the United States, a company's employees decide whether to form a union by holding a referendum by secret ballot. Unions then elect their representatives through a similar process.
Google's activists are not attempting to form a traditional union. They know that they are deeply unpopular and would lose any fair secret ballot election in which they were on the ballot. The activists believe that by playing pretend-union, they can gain all the influence of a real union without the accountability and risk. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too.