Google Walkout is the account of Google employees who organized the walkout, writing about worker organizing, firings, and contract workers.
HN commenters cite it in debates on Google's firing of organizers, union-busting claims, and the limits of US labor law.
> Before you call anybody ignorant, maybe stop and think about the last time a tech employer murdered people.
Does the YouTube shooting count? Google only sent real time security updates to full time employees, leaving contractors to fend for themselves, even though they’re now a majority contractor workforce:
https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/invisible-no-longer-googles-shadow-workforce-speaks-up-9ea04b7bcc41
And this event certainly has pushed labor organizing at the company.
See also worker deaths at Amazon:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-warehouse-worker-deaths
It doesn’t seem at all irrelevant to me that companies have a long history of compromising workers safety, unto their deaths, and especially when workers don’t organize to defend themselves.
The progress you celebrate is because people before you did this en masse, so perhaps it is a good idea to be a little more respectful and cognizant of that history.
> This is entirely not true when discussing the conditions of work: see the National Labor Relations Act.
The NLRA is pretty much toothless nowadays.
https://jalopnik.com/the-tesla-firings-were-about-unionizing-efforts-uaw-1819877228
https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/google-fired-us-for-organizing-were-fighting-back-d0daa8113aed
> Nor is it strictly true for speech that takes place outside the workplace.
You are nominally correct. However, if I am your employer and I want to fire you I can almost certainly come up with some legitimate reason to put on the record. Your only recourse will be to file a wrongful termination suit and try to prove that the real reason I fired you was something other than what I said it was. Good luck with that.
Also, if you're in an at-will state, I don't even have to come up with an excuse. If I want you gone, you're gone.
I think it's worth including here a link to the protesters statement, especially because one of the employees states that they were categorically told they were not fired for leaking company information.
https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/googles-next-moonshot-union-busting-7bd2784dc690
The"unauthorized access" argument is tainted by the ambiguity of these new document access rules, or that they were introduced after hiring a "union busting" company, this article claims: https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/googles-next-moonshot-union-busting-7bd2784dc690
Firing organizers was an example of that: https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/google-fired-us-for-organizing-were-fighting-back-d0daa8113aed
I don't think firing Damore was?
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
You can read Claire's reasons for leaving Google in her own words here: https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/why-a-googlewalkout-organizer-left-google-26d1e3fbe317