Google Says Staff Have No Right to Protest Its Choice of Clients
bloomberg.com
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How would/should a restaurant react if some waiters team up and argue to other waiters "we shouldn't serve those bloody [insert your favorite group] bastards in this restaurant, they're immoral and evil" ? Would/should their managers have the right to intervene and prevent that? IMHO such requests simply are not a legitimate demand that should be protected under labor law - for those aspects, the employer can set the policy and if you disagree with the employer's policy, you can quit or be fired even in countries/states where otherwise they can't fire you just because.
I agree completely. However, if an employee doesn't refuse to serve a particular customer, but instead voices to management that they do not want to serve that customer, I don't think it should be ok to fire them. In this case, it seems to be less about declining to serve and more about voicing an opinion (showing a petition throughout the office).
voicing an opinion with the intent to gather enough employee consensus to pressure the employer to not serve a particular customer. So the end result is the same - an employee was able to override the decision on who to serve made by management/shareholder.
An employee voicing an opinion is not wrong - but if the reason for said opinion is not in the best interest of the employer, that would mean the employer won't want to heed it unless forced by law.
That's literally what makes it potentially protected by labor law though.
Now, it's only protected if it counts as "working conditions". But gathering employee consensus to pressure the employer about "working conditions" is literally exactly what is protected by labor law. Whether the "reasons for their opinions" on working conditions are "in the best interest of the employer" or not.
Under what circumstances and conditions do you think this law came about?
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> Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (the Act) guarantees employees "the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection,"
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/in...
"To engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection" is in fact what's protected, not "voicing opinions". Employers actually do have the right to fire you for "voicing opinions", in theory (the first ammendment constrains the government, not employers), although in practice it probably shouldn't be an opinion related to all that stuff above, or voicing the opinion might have been part of those activities which the employee has the right to do.
It's too cute to claim that even if only one person is expressing an opinion, that it isn't "concerted" and "for mutual aid".
Even the first person to speak up about something is trying to get support from others, and if we used sophistry to allow employers to suppress that, then how do you get to the next step of organizing people?
An honest person looks at their argument and if it leads to an absurdity, such as with any law completely negating it, the argument must be BS.
One reason this matters, is that employees do not in fact generally have the equivalent of first ammendment rights at work. I'm just saying the law in the US, agree or not. (although I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice).
So for instance, if you work at, I dunno, a company that sells the color Blue, and you go around speaking at conferences on how Blue is actually the worst color and everyone should use Yellow instead, it's unlikely this would be considered a protected activity they can't fire you for. You don't generally have "free speech" rights at work. (The current law, whether we like it or not).
If the original commenter thinks you should, that you should generally be able to voice whatever opinion you want totally unrelated to "organizing" activities, go around telling everyone that Blue is a terrible mistake of a color while working at Blue Inc and they shouldn't be able to fire you for it since you're just expressing your opinion... they are actually arguing for an expansion of labor rights, which is to say a restriction on employer ability to fire, that does not currently exist in the US. Which, sure, I could welcome that. It's not the way it works now.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomspiggle/2018/09/28/free-spee...
The rights you take for granted are not permitted to workers, even when the law says so, everybody assumes stockholders have.
Look at GameStop and its followers. It was selling "Blue", that is, video games in stores, and some weirdos on reddit became obsessed, caused a short squeeze, or so the myth goes, and some of them had strong opinions that the company should and could totally pivot to some sort of completely different business that's substantially online. That is, "Yellow".
So if shareholders can engage in that sort of activity, why not a union? And if a union can, then surely the law requires that people be able to do it whether or before there is an official union; the whole point is to enable and protect collective action.
"employees do not in fact generally have the equivalent of first ammendment rights at work"
Ok, but nobody said they did - they have specific rights from a different source.
Sometimes companies, even large or long-lived ones, do have to totally change their business. I forget which one it was, but there was one of those snack cake/junk food companies that went bankrupt a while ago. Ideally, management and workers would find a way together to save things. When a company goes down the toilet like that, management usually blames the union, so it would be perverse to declare that in general, the workers need to stfu and gbtw instead of having opinions on the business.
Google is too big to fail, and can survive almost any negative impact that comes from firing employees for activism or even mere discussion. There is almost no comparable social or legal leverage shielding employees of massive corporations from being fired for deviating from completely neutral droneship.
This could be the underlying problem. When will feds start anti-trust actions against the tech behemoths?
This is called cancel culture. In a polarized society everybody has a beef with somebody else. To get served you'd need to have neighborhoods specific to each subculture - god knows the last elections were proof that it's not just a thought experiment.
Or are you're going to insist that the minorities you mentioned are real scumbangs and they're the only ones not deserving service? Well, who decides that, society-wise? You'd need committees to discuss who's protected and who's not. Can you deny service to As? Or to Bs? God, what a mess.
What we have now is a decent situation, mostly because it's simple and it works. You have a strong society-wide bias on offering service to everybody. The owner is free to deny service in extreme cases, but they very rarely do. The law says you can't filter based on a few criteria (like race), but that's mostly not needed because of the strong default above. Why change it?
Conversly, I don't like google and I try to avoid using their services. That's cancel culture. Or if you follow recent events, boycotting Gigabyte over exploding PSU's is cancel culture. Employees denying service to someone who just trashed the store and took a dump at aisle 5 are also participating in cancel culture. Airlines cancel customers who make the flight unsafe all the time. Heck, you can end up on a no-fly list and get cancelled by a huge number of airlines for that one time you popped the emergency exit to take a smoke on the wing of the plane, waiting for things to proceed.
The main difference is that usually you don't call some of those cancel culture unless you dislike what it's about.
That's not Cancel culture, that's just "stand for what you think is right"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture
>The notion of cancel culture is a variant on the term call-out culture and constitutes a form of boycotting or shunning involving an individual (often a celebrity) who is deemed to have acted or spoken in a questionable or controversial manner.
I would also argue that in the colloquial usage, Call Out Culture, "Stand for what you think is right" and Cancel Culture refer to the same thing in this context.
That's the difference, you stand for what (you think) is "right", and NOT that everyone else is wrong.
I may be mistaken occasionally (hard to believe, but it happens), or I just believe that a functional society is based on more than just being right. Either way, I will support ground rules for open debate even if they momentarily hurt my argument or my tribe.
You're making it really easy to argue :) Do you want a generic answer to what's the difference between your examples and the grandparent's? They're examples a potential customer directly interfering with the operation of a business. A client's opinions don't touch the way a cafe operates. His/her fecal matter really really do.
You can take this criteria pretty far and it'll still be useful. Is a university professor mistaken about something he's teaching? Fire him without a problem. Does the administration disagree with his political views? Firing him is cancel culture.
Edit: and yes, of course you're free to not buy from somebody you don't like. That wasn't ever doubted or discussed.
On your university professor example; what is mistaken about something they are teaching but a disagreement in political views on their teachings? Can you really judge mistakes without becoming political about it? And in many cases, those can intuitively overlap, such as if the professor is teaching that people of color are less intelligent because of their skin color. Their teaching is wrong and they will be fired for political reasons. They'll be cancelled for that.
One can also argue that employees can simply refuse to sell their work hours to their employer if they disagree with a customer (aka a strike), however, Google has been very resilient against allowing employees to bargain on a level playing field (after all what are employees but customers seeking to sell their body and time for money?)
Second is conflating things that affect a businesses operation in concrete ways with abstract ethical transgressions. They're very different things. Half the US population voted for Trump, but I doubt you'll find a handful to support shitting in stores, or opening plane doors during flight. That's not a small difference, it's a 4-5 digits difference.
> such as if the professor is teaching that people of color are less intelligent because of their skin color
If he's a biology or psychology professor, then it's a factual error and he should be fired for it. If he's teaching physics, then it's at most an optics issue, and while he has a fair chance of being fired it'll be a cultural decision. In a different society an atheist may be fired for speaking his beliefs. I'll also note that you picked a rather heavy-handed example - most real life cases are far from being so openly racist. I could also say something about correlation vs causation, but that would be plain goading you :)
Again, there isn't really a difference except which side of a business contract does the cancelling.
> Second is conflating things that affect a businesses operation in concrete ways with abstract ethical transgressions. They're very different things. Half the US population voted for Trump, but I doubt you'll find a handful to support shitting in stores, or opening plane doors during flight. That's not a small difference, it's a 4-5 digits difference.
I don't see why one of those is supposed to be some secret protected class. If you vote fascist, you ought to be thrown in jail IMO but that's off topic. A business should very well be allowed to deny supporting fascist customers. It doesn't matter how well supported an action was, a business should have the right to deny business to a customer or employee at will.
The company can't give the service without the employees cooperation.
Consider the waitresses saying "don't serve that guy, he tries to grab my butt every time" to each other. The managers are shit for forcing them to. They might not be able to get a sexual assault conviction, but that doesn't mean they should still be subjected to said customer
/me laughs
Seriously though:
> “What we have here is a protest that does not seek to improve employees’ terms and conditions of employment,” but rather “a purely political protest that sought to use Google’s government contracts, or potential government contracts, as leverage,” he said.
> Google violated the law “to discourage employees from engaging in” legally-protected activism, according to a July complaint issued by labor board prosecutors.
How hard will the Labor Board fight to protect employee political speech? It seems like a different level of concern compared to pursuing reasonable working conditions for workers.
Protecting employee interests is a basic right, and if the employer could define the set of valid interests, it would completely negate all protections.
Quoting from the law that I believe this is based on:
"RIGHTS OF EMPLOYEES
Sec. 7. [§ 157.] Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection..."
https://www.nlrb.gov/guidance/key-reference-materials/nation...
I don't think that's how that law works, although it's not well tested in this scenario. Unless the employees could articulate a specific harm, judicial system will not be sympathetic to them.
Making a business deal is not an excuse for breaking the law.
And if some activist investor(s) were threatened with having their stock taken away because they were causing trouble, that would not just happen, there would be instant legal warfare which the entrenched interests might well lose, right?
Assuming everybody takes all that for granted, why would it be unreasonable for workers to have the right to do similar stuff without being fired? Especially if the damn law says they do.
That right does not allow employees to affect business deals. i don't understand where people get the idea it does. IIUC this is still untested in court, but it seems extremely unlikely that courts would conclude that labor laws permit employees to kill deals they don't like.
If that was the case there would be massive implications across the industry and it just doesn't jibe with basic understanding of how business in america works.
So what is this, the unwritten law?
Your position seems absurd to me. If employees have the right to (try to) influence the business in any meaningful way, then they can potentially "kill deals they don't like" directly or indirectly.
This solution is incredibly flawed, I'm aware. But just a thought.
Yes
As part of the fallout from this, one small but important part of company culture was broken. It used to be that almost all docs were visible to all employees and exceptions were locked down with the access controls docs gives you. Any design docs, roadmaps, etc. you were curious about was very likely to be accessible. Maybe you were considering using a service for your stack and wanted more detail or context, maybe you are considering switching teams and want to see what they're up to, maybe you're just curious and want to learn about something new. Soon after these people were fired the default was swapped to things being very locked down and most people do not think to open it up to more than the reviewers/teammates that need access.
(I'm also of the opinion that the notice that them NLRB required Alphabet post in-office was not sufficiently visible as all of the offices I've been in had them tucked away in places like the mail room but that's just me)
But that has a lot in common with obscene tuition charged to the same students by the same administrations. People will generally be more open to demands from those who directly contribute money to their salaries. The dynamics at a place of employment is very different - especially in case of entities that so far have shown no difficulties in attracting replacement talent.
Then again, I find it strange to refuse working for your own government.
Does that mean that forgoing defense contracts mean Google won't profit? Probably not, but cloud services aren't just about profit.
Not based on losing the revenue generated directly by U.S. Customs and Border Protection contracts or any other government agency, but based on having icy/arms length relations with governments.
It's very important to them that governments dont see them as a problem and start looking at all the different ways to dismantle them and poke in to their business. Maintaining multifaceted relationships with them, having lots of different connections with lots of different departments, goes a long way to helping prevent that.
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.