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Google Businesses United States Technology

Google Urged the US To Limit Protection for Activist Workers (bloomberg.com) 224

Google, whose employees have captured international attention in recent months through high-profile protests of workplace policies, has been quietly urging the U.S. government to narrow legal protection for workers organizing online. From a report: During the Obama administration, the National Labor Relations Board broadened employees' rights to use their workplace email system to organize around issues on the job. In a 2014 case, Purple Communications, the agency restricted companies from punishing employees for using their workplace email systems for activities like circulating petitions or fomenting walkouts, as well as trying to form a union. In filings in May 2017 and November 2018, obtained via Freedom of Information Act request, Alphabet's Google urged the National Labor Relations Board to undo that precedent.

Citing dissents authored by Republican appointees, Google's attorneys wrote that the 2014 standard "should be overruled" and a George W. Bush-era precedent -- allowing companies to ban organizing on their employee email systems -- should be reinstated. 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.

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Google Urged the US To Limit Protection for Activist Workers

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  • How 1984 of them (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24, 2019 @11:09AM (#58014676)

    Whoda thunk a bunch of rich white 1%ers who push "progressive" ideals is also all about stifling any dissent?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      rich WHITE?

      have you BEEN to any bay area campus?

      (narrarator: most tech workers are indian and chinese; last I checked, that's not 'white' by definition).

      • Whoda thunk a bunch of rich white 1%ers who push "progressive" ideals is also all about stifling any dissent?

        rich WHITE? have you BEEN to any bay area campus? (narrarator: most tech workers are indian and chinese; last I checked, that's not 'white' by definition).

        Clue: the rich 1%'ers sniffling dissent are the senior management, not the workers.

    • rich white

      Skin color is totally orthogonal to power and control, numbnuts.

      • There is still a clear correlation, though one that is steadily lessening as time passes. Wealth and skin color are both inherited.

        • by Z80a ( 971949 )

          The same kind of logic could (and is) used by very bad people to argue things such as exterminating all the black people.
          While most rich people are white, most white people aren't rich, as most black people are not violent criminals and so forth.
          Beware of the retarded mindflip.

          • Re: How 1984 of them (Score:4, Informative)

            by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Thursday January 24, 2019 @04:45PM (#58017002)

            "While most rich people are white, most white people aren't rich, as most black people are not violent criminals and so forth."

            And just as importantly, the sins don't pass from father to son. White people born today aren't guilty of a crime or owe any sort of debt to people randomly born with dark skin. Just like people randomly born wealthy with dark skin don't owe any debt. There is no score to settle and nothing to correct, the people who committed the crimes and the victims are all dead or so old as to be irrelevant. Your grandparents might have had something coming but you aren't entitled to collect it from the grandchildren of the people who owed it because being in either position was a dice roll. That's the whole point, you can't change what you are born as and that is what makes discrimination on those traits so evil. It is the same lesson we learned about thrones and positions passed from parent to child.

            Frankly the wealth shouldn't pass down either. The sensible thing would just be a tax on wealth rather than income. If you can't bring in enough to cover the taxes on your built up wealth you sell it and pay the bill. After all if you can't grow enough to cover the tax the wealth should be in the hands of those doing a better job. Merit.

        • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          Entitlement to lost wealth and blame for how it was acquired are not. You don't have any say in whether you are born rich or poor or what color your skin is. The son doesn't inherit the sins of the father and he doesn't inherit a legitimate complaint of his father's either.

    • by zifn4b ( 1040588 )

      Whoda thunk a bunch of rich white 1%ers

      A lot of the 1%ers are not white. A lot of the money is in investment firms and the racial diversity is a bit different than you think it is. But keep exercising your free speech to push the false racism narrative I guess.

    • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      What do rich white 1%ers have to do with Google? I think you meant to say high income indian 1%ers.

  • by ZorinLynx ( 31751 ) on Thursday January 24, 2019 @11:11AM (#58014686) Homepage

    With the news of Chrome disabling ad-blocking extensions, and now then, I guess we can put Google squarely in the "evil" category.

    The thing is, what other options are there? There's Apple, which for the moment is a bit better but they have some evil of their own, and there's no guarantee they won't go full evil like Google has in the future.

    Microsoft? HA, I kill me.

    Should I just hunker down and stop using the Internet? I don't know anymore.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well if you were going to rate evil, wouldn't it go something like this from worst to, hmm, not as bad:

      Oracle
      Google
      Apple
      Microsoft

      Yes, the Microsoft of old was pretty evil. They have gotten a bit better while many of the rest have gotten much worse.
      • And which of these owns Twitter?

      • by Tailhook ( 98486 )

        Well if you were going to rate evil

        Yeah sure. That's a useful exercise. When you finish ironing out your evil ranking system why not run around in a circle and make chicken noises for a while? Should make for a really productive Thursday!

        Google is a piratic valley cesspit just like all the other valley pirates, except that it has a greater cohort of apologists and naive pink hairs that are still knocking back Google's progressive flavored kool-aid.

    • by epine ( 68316 )

      The thing is, what other options are there?

      Welcome to the free market, where real choice exists only in chaotic beginnings, and every mature product space collapses to two (or maybe three) barely distinct shades of moral chartreuse.

      I grew up in a non-gospel church with "We Shall Overcome" as regular staple.

      As an adult, I now understood that those who sang it best were the committed capitalists, overcoming the strictures of competition in an open market of ideas, where the customers make important choices ab

    • Depends what you use it for.
      Nobody honestly cares what kind of porn you watch.

    • by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Thursday January 24, 2019 @11:39AM (#58014822)
      In the interest of cost cutting and efficiency they decided to drop the middle word.
    • all large corps are evil.

      life sucks as you realize this.

      life aint no disney movie.

      oh, and humans generally suck.

      that is all.

      • Corporations are not inherently evil. They're just intelligence without conscience or accountability, neither legal nor moral. That usually leads to pretty rotten actions, which we consider evil, but corporations are not evil. Corporations neither think nor act.

        The shell of a corporation only allows people to act without having to justify their actions morally, because they have to do something, because if they don't, someone else would have and they'd have been fired.

        The main difference to the Third Reich

    • With the news of Chrome disabling ad-blocking extensions

      Has Chrome really disabled ad blocking extensions?

    • that's the option. When you have a natural monopoly you write laws to keep things from going south. Or you let them go south (often out of a slavish devotion to laissez faire economics) and live with the consequences.
  • Ah, the royal 'we' (Score:5, Informative)

    by ChoGGi ( 522069 ) <slashdot&choggi,org> on Thursday January 24, 2019 @11:24AM (#58014746) Homepage

    "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"

    Thems weasel words Google.

    • "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"

      Thems weasel words Google.

      We're not lobbying to change the rules, we just want them to be different and are trying to make that happen.

    • It's not a stroke. It's just a temporary problem with blood-flow to the head.

      (paraphrasing a line from the movie "Dave")
    • Oh, that old "It's against the law but someone said it probably shouldn't be" defense.

    • by sinij ( 911942 )

      "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"

      Thems weasel words Google.

      I just Googled definitions, and they are using them exactly, perfectly, correctly, don't look any further now, we know your browsing history...

  • by WCMI92 ( 592436 ) on Thursday January 24, 2019 @11:33AM (#58014796) Homepage

    This is one reason why. Among many.

  • disagree (Score:5, Insightful)

    by supernova87a ( 532540 ) <kepler1.hotmail@com> on Thursday January 24, 2019 @11:40AM (#58014832)
    I support a company's right to be able to regulate the internal use of their software and tools that they provide and pay for. Just because a certain message might be (at the moment) a popular one doesn't mean it gets more privileges or gets to assume the use of someone's resources without question.

    Freedom of speech, and US regulations about labor organization communications, don't imply the right to disseminate messages in any way without regard to the rights of others or in any channel you may encounter. People are free to speak to each other, and they're free to publish documents, papers, blog posts, news articles using their resources.

    Google is right to do this, and they should learn to act even more like a professional business. They already brewed themselves a shitstorm by inviting their employees to discuss and debate controversial political topics on internal forums as if it's some kind of college campus. It's coming back to bite them in the ass.
    • by tomhath ( 637240 )
      Employees were not allowed to use the company's copy machines for this type of activity. Using the company's computers, printers, network, email system, etc. is no different.
    • I support a company's right to be able to regulate the internal use of their software and tools that they provide and pay for.

      They already brewed themselves a shitstorm by inviting their employees to discuss and debate controversial political topics on internal forums

      Well Google can't have it both ways, can they?

      • Bring your whole self to work. Except the part of you that hates being treated like shit by your employer.

    • but they don't and they don't want to (it would hit moral hard).

      Furthermore there is nothing wrong with giving workers extra protections. As a worker you already have a significant disadvantage (you've got less money and you work for a living as opposed to owning things for a living). If that balance is not redressed somehow you get oligarchy and totalitarianism like we had in the era of robber barons & company stores.

      Don't be afraid to have a sense of entitlement. You work for a living. You ear
    • Re:disagree (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sinij ( 911942 ) on Thursday January 24, 2019 @01:06PM (#58015520)

      I support a company's right to be able to regulate the internal use of their software and tools that they provide and pay for.

      Do you understand scope of Google control over modern communications?! If you let them do it, they can very effectively censor any attempt to organize - it won't be searchable by Google, you won't be able to email to @gmail, you won't be able to make Youtube videos.

      • This is talking about the company's internal mail and forums. I don't know what random tangent you're off on.
    • Generally the first amendment protects your right not to say things as well, and forcing the company to pay factionally for email to support speech it doesn't like violates this principle, however minor.

      The government is basicslly forcing you to fund your detractors.

  • by Cpt_Kirks ( 37296 ) on Thursday January 24, 2019 @11:42AM (#58014848)

    Did I hit the wrong site? /. gets more like /b/ every day.

    Sad.

    On topic:

    Want to organize? Go for it.

    Using the company email system to foment strikes or walk outs? You should be fired on the spot.

  • Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but I don't think company resources should be used to undermine that company. Why should a company be forced to let employees use company infrastructure against itself? I also think it is stupid for an employee to use company resources for these activities. The company can monitor those resources and find out who in the company needs to get assigned the tasks that no one else would want to do. The whole thing seems a bit silly, although I am a simple minded fool so..
    • by shess ( 31691 )

      Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but I don't think company resources should be used to undermine that company. Why should a company be forced to let employees use company infrastructure against itself? I also think it is stupid for an employee to use company resources for these activities. The company can monitor those resources and find out who in the company needs to get assigned the tasks that no one else would want to do. The whole thing seems a bit silly, although I am a simple minded fool so...

      What if the employees are trying to save the company from making a bad decision? Do they have to do that entirely externally to the company?

      I worked at Google for a long time, and there were many times when someone used internal communications for completely-inappropriate stuff. But there were many times when such communications were essential to get things sorted out. Unfortunately, there was not a bright line between the different types of communications, mostly because people are people, with all the

  • If you are using a resource someone else owns and pays for (such as corporate email) then on principle they should be allowed to set the limits for the use of that resource. Encrypted email services are cheap and free, and workers are free to organize their gripes outside of those channels.
  • I, for one, support our corporations right to censor, misinform, & coerce us into doing whatever they like. Human decency gets in the way of profits, for crying out loud!
  • I see they have sold their souls and now expect recompense from their masters in the heap

  • Disclaimer: IAAL

    Lawyers are taught from the beginning to think and plead "in the alternative" which sounds much more sophisticated than "throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" or "bury the judge in bullshit and see what he'll buy". This is particularly true when playing defense.

    Lawyers operate like the litigation realm is some isolated 4th dimension quasi-universe where the rules of time, space, and physics don't apply and what they put in their pleadings does not have real world consequences.
  • Citing dissents authored by Republican appointees

    Oh, well that cinches it.

    Dissent is not allowed.

    Republicans aren't allowed either. Well, we're working on that one, but we'll get there ...

  • If you are on company time, if you are using company property, then you should only be doing company business.

  • by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Thursday January 24, 2019 @03:07PM (#58016348) Journal
    The man has been destroying Google since he became CEO. Now, he wants to stop workers from unionizing.
    Look, if they want to limit email, I am good with it. That is THEIR system. But once you are actively trying to block any legal union attempts, well, that is BS.
  • by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Thursday January 24, 2019 @04:35PM (#58016918) Journal

    I've got 2 contacts in there and I continue to hear stories about these people effectively hijacking the workplace, shaming others into joining their protests, putting up banners all over the campuses and so on.

    Nothing wrong with equality but now you basically have the gestapo running around making up rules and trying to enforce them, people who seem to think their entire job is to stop people working productively and to just push politics.

    Google is no longer producing exceptional tech, or at least, less of it. There's a lot more misses now, there's a lot of odd decisions, I feel like management are stuck for getting things done, dealing with these people and moving in the right direction.

    I visited a campus a few months ago and it was something /straight/ out of a TV show / movie or 1990s high school drama, I saw a wide variety of people walking around chatting and little productivity. I'd say I saw a 60/40 ratio of women to men, most people relatively young and attractive.
    Out of the 3 or 400 people I saw, I'd say, I saw about 5 guys, at most who were your traditional looking neckbeard type programmer dudes (Let's be honest, a lot of us don't present great) - they were on their own and just generally looked pretty out of place there if anything. The only thing I saw less of, was people over the age of about 35. I've never felt so old in my life. It felt like clique club.

    But I digress, I've posted this before and had responses here before, from others inside, confirming that there's a good portion of the workforce, simply not doing /real work/. It's a place of business, to develop products and software and a /lot/ of staff are not only not doing that, they're actively making it more difficult for the business to do so.

    I miss the days where I thought Google was the most amazing company of all time, near a decade ago. Endlessly producing amazing things, better than others, for 'free'. Now they shut things at a moments notice and 'fix' existing products with UI overhauls that make them worse (this month? Google maps)

The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.

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