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Comment by calcifer | Hacker News Reader

> do your fucking job

> I'm not taking sides

Sure you are not.

> I'm talking simply from a contractual standpoint that you signed on the day of your employment.

As the article states, the people in question were union organizers. It's illegal to fire someone for union activities regardless of what their contract says.

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>> It's illegal to fire someone for union activities regardless of what their contract says.

So if you spend all day on "union activities" instead of doing the job that you were contracted to do, you can't be fired for it? That's incredible.

I understand that you can be fired for failing to fulfill your normal duties, if you spend all day doing union activities. The protection in meant for someone who correctly fulfills their work and, in addition, does union activities.

If you read the article you'll find they were fired for stalking and harrassment (if Google is to be believed)

Isn't that technically doing their job at Google ?

Apparently they can only do that to their users not co-workers :D

This joke should have been voted to the top

"Don't get high on your own supply" is a widely known rule.

lmao, that's number 4 in the ten crack commandments haha

All the article says is that they subscribed to other people's public calendars. I do the same with many of my colleagues, am I harrassing them?

Is it also pure coincidence that these union organizers just happened to be fired for harrassment soon after Google hired a union busting company?

The article also says they shared screenshots of their calendars externally.

At least around here, it's very common to keep union activity outside work e-mail, so management can't simply read it all. I would not be surprised if "externally" means "a coworkers private e-mail address".

I'm sure nobody is laid off just because they were doing "union activities". That's the problem I see: label everything as "union activity", therefore, someone can become a sort of sacrosanct person, inmune to everything. No matter what you do, if you label your activities as "union activity" you can hit people on your job that nobody can laid off you.

> illegal to fire someone for union activities regardless of what their contract says.

Pretty sure Google hires good lawyers. If us ramdom HN-ers know this, they probably went through the motions of covering their ass, legally

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