Dozens of Google workers who were fired after internal protests surrounding a lucrative contract that the technology company has with the Israeli government have filed a complaint with labor regulators in an attempt to get their jobs back.
The complaint filed late Monday with the National Labor Relations Board alleges about 50 workers were unfairly fired or placed on administrative leave earlier this month in the aftermath of employee sit-ins that occurred at Google offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California. The protests targeted a $1.2 billion deal known as Project Nimbus that provides artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli government. The fired works contend the system is being lethally deployed in the Gaza war — an allegation Google refutes.
Google jettisoned the workers’ “participation (or perceived participation) in a peaceful, non-disruptive protest that was directly and explicitly connected to their terms and conditions of work.”
What would you call a strike?
An extremely specific and highly regulated type of work action has a lot of rules in order to legally be protected.
For instance:
https://www.nlrb.gov/strikes
Especially at the level of working for Google, employment is a voluntary agreement, not a right. If the employees find it unconscionable to work for Google, the correct thing to do is to, you know, not work for Google.
Strikes only have so many restrictions because the US government would like to effectively outlaw them without appearing to have outlawed them.
Ding ding ding. It’s the same reason general strikes are outlawed. For the unaware, a general strike is when workers go on strike to protest something not specific to their job. For instance, if rail workers are striking, a general strike would be Google employees going on strike in solidarity.
The government saw how effective general strikes can be, because it puts an immense amount of external pressure on the company being struck. To use the above example, now it’s not just railway workers pressuring the rail company to change. It’s also Google (and any other companies being affected by a general strike) pressuring the rail company to change.
It worked wonders in parts of Europe. It’s a large part of why large parts of Europe have decent worker protections. In fact it worked so well that the US government banned it. Solidarity strikes are outright illegal in the US, because the government knows it works.