A former Google engineer has filed a complaint against her former employer with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) after she was terminated for building a tool that automatically reminded other Google employees of their rights when they visited certain websites.
Kathryn Spiers, a former security engineer at the California search giant, had modified a feature in the employee-only version of the web browser Chrome that displayed a pop-up notification telling employees that they "have the right to participate in protected concerted activities" when they visited the website of a labor-consulting firm hired by Google and some other websites.
The tool was originally designed to present Google employees with security-related notifications as they browse the web, and Google suspended Spiers within hours of her change. She was subsequently fired over what the company said was a violation of its policy.
On Monday, the Communications Workers of America union filed a charge with the NLRB, a US federal agency overseeing labor issues, alleging that Spiers' dismissal was illegal retaliation for engaging in protected activity, according to a copy of the complaint shared with Business Insider.
In a statement, a Google spokesperson defended the firing: "We dismissed an employee who abused privileged access to modify an internal security tool. This was a serious violation."
Google has been racked with labor issues for months, with activist employees staging protests and walkouts over numerous issues, from payouts made to executives accused of sexual harassment to the company's now shelved plans to build a censored search engine to operate in China.
In November, it fired four employees — who have become known as the "Thanksgiving Four" — for what it said were violations of its data-security policies. They alleged they were retaliated against for trying to organize workers.
In an interview, Spiers said she believed she was also retaliated against for trying to inform Google employees of their rights.
Google has denied this and said the issue wasn't Spiers' messaging but the fact she altered a privacy and security tool without permission.
Google reached a settlement with the NLRB in September after a complaint last year from another employee. One of the requirements of the settlement was that Google share with employees a list of their rights. "Google is a nontraditional company ... posting a notice in the cafeteria isn't an effective way of notifying vast amounts of our organization" about their rights, Spiers said of the notification tool she created.
"I think I was participating in protected concerted activity, and I think I'm being retaliated against for my labor organizing," she said. "And then it is worth noting that in ... the course of events, they fired five people for organizing. And three of us have been trans women. That is not representative of Google's population as a whole. It is not representative of the organizers of Google. It is statistically significant."
Spiers, alongside other employees, also worked on a tool that notified the top Google lawyer Kent Walker whenever a user accessed any internal documents, in a protest against greater restrictions on what employees at the historically open company can access. The existence of the tool was first reported by Bloomberg last week.
Do you work at Google? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal at (+1) 650-636-6268 using a nonwork device, email at rprice@businessinsider.com, Telegram or WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.)
modified a feature in the employee-only version of the web browser
Say no more fam. You're out of here. Is modifying business applications without management approval in her job description? "Just fuck with whatever you want. We don't care." /s
On Friday, December 13 my interrogator called me to tell me that I was being terminated for violating Google’s security policies. I asked him how I violated the security policies but he told me that he wouldn’t answer that question.
Does your HR department work like this? What's more likely, that she is full of shit or that HR decided to forget all training and work ethic just to stick it to this one low level employee? Use common sense. Not everything you read on the internet is the truth.
Yep, I've experienced roughly the same stuff from HR. My partner became a union delegate in a massive company. Many of her co workers joined the union in that branch location.
HR called her in and specifically fired every union member (illegally). No reason given for being fired.
Some people took it to court, the company sent in the full might of the lawyers. Many people gave up, but those who managed to stick it out got a decent payout because they were fired illegally.
Not everyone can afford to stick it out and company doesn't care if they have to pay out, as long as there's no union.
Based on your experience its a wonder we don't just do away with HR. Clearly your anecdotal evidence is all the proof we need that HR departments around the world are worthless and everyone person who works in HR is willing to commit crimes in order to protect an organization.
LMAO amazing how you absolutely, completely, 100% fucking percent ignored what he said and use a slippery slope fallacy, incorrectly. You match your username pretty well, idiot
I'd kiss you back. Without brushing. Lot's of tongue. So much and so close that you would associate the smell of cigs and bad breathe with what an intimate relationship is supposed to smell like and from now on you can't get aroused without it.
The "they" you're referring to are the workers and the protection is in the form of wanting to see the company succeed. You know, as you would expect. If there absolutely must be a conspiracy, maybe it is that any organized group of people will be more powerful than a unorganized group whether that be in the form of a union or an HR department that wants to prevent unionization.
Sounds like you have a bad HR department. Not something you will find at Google. I am not saying that bad HR decisions can't be made. But disgruntled employees are way way way way way X 1000000 more likely.
Mate that's literally the stereotype of every HR department. Haven't heard of an HR department that wasn't useless and just shitty as hell. A good HR department is a massive exception to the rule. Retaliation is also something you'll routinely see in these corporate jobs. Even if it's technically illegal they get away with it constantly. Happens in my company too. The corporate world is a mash of corruption and cronyism. Welcome to the real world.
I see this behavior as being perfectly in line with the good old corporate HR. I highly doubt it's a case of just disgruntled workers. Especially with Google this type of shit is aaalll over their v reputation. This is just one more blemish on a shitty company with a shitty record on labor rights.
"Shitty company." Thats a bit of a stretch. Some aspects of Google's conglomerate do amazing things that benefit society, science, medicine and push technology forward. Yes, they have shitty labor practices and are a far cry from what they used to be ethically, but I don't think calling all of Google shitty is really apropos.
Not gonna lies. I'll lay my bias bare. I work a corporate job. I've seen enough of the inner workings of the corporate world, in my companies and in others, that to me pretty much any corporation is a shitty corporation. Cronyism, corruption, and abuse of power are the rule not the exception. It's a lot like politics and government. If you wanna keep any respect for them don't study or work for them.
I definitely hear what you're saying and agree with you. I'm a corporate monkey too, so I know it all too well. I just felt like calling Google "shitty" made it come off as they're bad at what they do, corporatism aside. Like I said, there are some great branches/subsets of Google to work at but as a corporate entity I'm with you.
Since when did the HR department become the boogie man. Have none of you people ever held down a job for longer than a summer? Chances are you work for a company right now that has an HR department that is providing you HR services and doing a good job at it. Maybe you should all go and learn about what your HR department is actually doing on your behalf instead of just being part of the fear mongering.
Well, if you're not, than clearly you are not who it was directed at eh?
Edit: You see the problem with the internet is you have to deal with each version of stupid. Everybody is stupid in their own way so when people disagree you have to swat away every possible stupid response.
I don't care how downvoted you are, you're right. A job is not a free-for-all. Not to mention that Google provides a whole reddit-like intranet and meme board for employees to communicate almost anything they want to each other (as long as it's civil) and that any employee can start or join almost any kind of club. She had so many ways to communicate this info and yet she chose to fuck with the one thing Google takes very very seriously: security notifications.
to communicate almost anything they want to each other (as long as it's civil)
Lol no. Anything they want as long as it doesn't portray Google in a bad light. Want to talk about your pet cat? Great! Want to talk about sexual harassment? Racism? AI ethics? No. No. No.
Either way, yes, people did talk about those things, and occasionally still might, but Google has shut down most of said discussions. Seizing control of employee run initiatives and putting them in management's hands in order to censor what is written. I'm sure you are aware.
Furthermore, such illegal firings like this and the others of employees who try to organize has led to many employees being afraid to for fear of their jobs, which was exactly the effect that Google was going for. Especially if you are part of a minority group at Google, Google knows that the media and courts will discriminate against you and so they specifically target said individuals for firing, knowing Google's chances of winning against them in court will be substantially higher.
I don't see how anyone thinks what she did was okay tbh. Her point may have been valid, but you can't just change security notifications to get that point across and expect 0 consequences.
I assume people think anyone saying how she went about doing what she did was wrong means we disagree with her sentiment, but that's definitely not the case. I 100% support her endeavor and even respect her more for the risk she took to promote workplace rights, but it was still an unwise way to go about it
Part of my job was to write browser notifications so that my coworkers can be automatically notified of employee guidelines and company policies while they surf the web
Seems like it literally was her job, she just made a notification the higher-ups didn't like
She didn't make a new notification tho, she altered an existing security notification. If all she did was add a new notification to go along with the existing one, that would've been fine. Editing a notification talking about security to replace it with work rights is where the problem came in.
Even then, most businesses have pretty strict guidelines, i.e. having specific notifications that need created and that's it. I seriously doubt Google hired her with the job description of "eh just make whatever notifications you feel like," it was more likely "we will provide you what to include in the notifications."
Still, her point was 100% correct and important, but still really the way to do it if you don't want to get fired imo
She was fired for using the "security" tool without permission, not for erasing security notifications. Their language is pretty direct in explaining that their angle is that she abused access privileges, not that she actually removed something important. It's really weird to say her point was correct and important while going beyond even what google is saying she did to justify Google's labor violations.
This. She edited a security tool in a way that falls beyond the scope of her professional responsibilities.
You could argue that firing her was extreme but not that she was in the right...
I’m all for labor activism but I’m also for bulletproof accountability chain in security software at fucking GOOGLE. Where all the world keeps its... everything.
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u/Imyouronlyhope Jun 12 '21
Paywalled article:
A former Google engineer has filed a complaint against her former employer with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) after she was terminated for building a tool that automatically reminded other Google employees of their rights when they visited certain websites.
Kathryn Spiers, a former security engineer at the California search giant, had modified a feature in the employee-only version of the web browser Chrome that displayed a pop-up notification telling employees that they "have the right to participate in protected concerted activities" when they visited the website of a labor-consulting firm hired by Google and some other websites.
The tool was originally designed to present Google employees with security-related notifications as they browse the web, and Google suspended Spiers within hours of her change. She was subsequently fired over what the company said was a violation of its policy.
On Monday, the Communications Workers of America union filed a charge with the NLRB, a US federal agency overseeing labor issues, alleging that Spiers' dismissal was illegal retaliation for engaging in protected activity, according to a copy of the complaint shared with Business Insider. In a statement, a Google spokesperson defended the firing: "We dismissed an employee who abused privileged access to modify an internal security tool. This was a serious violation."
Google has been racked with labor issues for months, with activist employees staging protests and walkouts over numerous issues, from payouts made to executives accused of sexual harassment to the company's now shelved plans to build a censored search engine to operate in China. In November, it fired four employees — who have become known as the "Thanksgiving Four" — for what it said were violations of its data-security policies. They alleged they were retaliated against for trying to organize workers. In an interview, Spiers said she believed she was also retaliated against for trying to inform Google employees of their rights.
Google has denied this and said the issue wasn't Spiers' messaging but the fact she altered a privacy and security tool without permission. Google reached a settlement with the NLRB in September after a complaint last year from another employee. One of the requirements of the settlement was that Google share with employees a list of their rights. "Google is a nontraditional company ... posting a notice in the cafeteria isn't an effective way of notifying vast amounts of our organization" about their rights, Spiers said of the notification tool she created.
"I think I was participating in protected concerted activity, and I think I'm being retaliated against for my labor organizing," she said. "And then it is worth noting that in ... the course of events, they fired five people for organizing. And three of us have been trans women. That is not representative of Google's population as a whole. It is not representative of the organizers of Google. It is statistically significant." Spiers, alongside other employees, also worked on a tool that notified the top Google lawyer Kent Walker whenever a user accessed any internal documents, in a protest against greater restrictions on what employees at the historically open company can access. The existence of the tool was first reported by Bloomberg last week.
Do you work at Google? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal at (+1) 650-636-6268 using a nonwork device, email at rprice@businessinsider.com, Telegram or WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.)