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A newly released Document clarification GoogleEfforts to eliminate activism among its employees, including unions. In an order filed on Friday, an administrative judge of the National Labor Relations Commission told Google to transfer a set of current and former employee documents related to its “Vivian Project” to its attorneys and hired a consulting company Consulting company. Employers are fighting against unionization efforts.
After worker activism began to heat up at the end of 2018, Google launched the Vivian program to discourage employees from joining unions. In the order, Google’s head of employment law, Michael Pfyl, described the mission of Vivian’s plan as: “Attract employees more actively and convince them that the union is bad.” The context in which Pfyl described it is not clear from the order. , It also mentioned the use of the media to quietly disseminate Google’s views on trade union technology workplaces.
Judge Paul Bogas ordered Google to comply with parts of the subpoena, requiring it to provide documents related to the Vivian project and Google’s employment of consultants for the anti-union company IRI. In November, Bogas issued a similar order on other documents related to Vivian and IRI; the subpoena involved more than 1,500 documents.
The subpoena is part of an NLRB case filed by seven Google employees and former employees in December 2019. (One former employee has settled.) Five employees were fired after participating in workplace activism, two employees were disciplined, including efforts to improve conditions for working Google contractors, and a petition was circulated calling for the company to terminate Contracts with U.S. government agencies involved in immigration and deportation and family separation. Paul Duke, one of the dismissed employees who made the allegations, said that the organization of the event was part of an effort to lay the foundation for the union.
In response to former employees’ claims that they were fired due to workplace organization, a Google spokesperson wrote: “The basic case here has nothing to do with the union. This is about employees violating clear security protocols and improperly accessing confidential information and System”-references to internal files accessed by employees.
Duke flatly rejected the claims that he and his colleagues violated the security agreement, saying that all engineers had access to these files, and the company later classified them as “need to know.”
In its objection to the subpoena, Google claimed attorney-client privilege and “work product privilege”, which protects the materials used to prepare the lawsuit. Bogas rejected many of these claims, calling one of them “kindly speaking, an overextension.” In an effort to characterize a potential union election as a litigation and thus enjoy the privileges, he wrote: “The defendant cannot attribute the fact that the new organizational effort among employees is merely a’litigation’-like straw spinning into gold- Give it the right to conceal its privileges in all aspects of its anti-union movement.”
Bogas’ order cited the efforts of Google executives, including the company’s legal counsel Christine Rata, “find a’respected voice to publish a column that outlines what a unionized tech workplace looks like”, and Urge Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Google not to join unions. The order stated that Kara Silverstein, Google’s director of human resources, told Lata in an internal message that she liked the idea, “but it should be done so that’there will be no fingerprints, nor will it be unique to Google. “” According to the order, IRI later provided Latta with a proposed draft of the column; it is not clear whether this article has ever been published.
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