> Google “retaliated against approximately 50 employees and interfered with their Section 7 rights by terminating and/or placing them on administrative leave in response to their protected concerted activity, namely, participation (or perceived participation) in a peaceful, non-disruptive protest that was directly and explicitly connected to their terms and conditions of work,” the complaint reads.

Seems very thin to call on the NLRA here. The "protesters" stated goals were to disrupt work even for people not a member of the non-union (therefore not a strike) which is not a protected activity. Moreover, were any of these employees or any members of the minority union actually working on the Israeli contracts they objected to? While you can protest against your job duties under the NLRA (or job duties of your collective union members) I don't see that you can protest against company functions which aren't job duties you or your class aren't a part of.

If the workers had just walked off the job and peacefully and non-disruptively protested in front of the building and refused to go back to their job until they (or other members of the minority union) had their job duties modified so they were not working on those projects and google had fired them, that seems like it would violate the NLRA.

Anyway this seems like some fun FAFO. I wonder how many of the people who got fired were even members of the non-union before the "protest".

But my read of the situation while skimming the NLRB summary [1] is this complaint is unlikely to win

> Strikes unlawful because of misconduct of strikers or other loss of protection. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a “sitdown” strike, when employees simply stay in the plant and refuse to work is not protected by the law.

This feels pertinent, but not a whole match.

> Furthermore, Section 8(b)(4) of the Act prohibits strikes for certain objects even though the objects are not necessarily unlawful if achieved by other means. An example of this would be a strike to compel Employer A to cease doing business with Employer B. It is not unlawful for Employer A voluntarily to stop doing business with Employer B, nor is it unlawful for a union merely to request that it do so. It is, however, unlawful for the union to strike with an object of forcing the employer to do so. These points will be covered in more detail in the explanation of Section 8(b)(4). In any event, employees who participate in an unlawful strike may be discharged and are not entitled to reinstatement.

On the summary page, this looks like striking to prevent their employer from doing business with another employer (IDF) and might apply, but further reading seems to indicate this is about striking to not do business with a non-union employer, which isn't actually relevant. But either way, it's not clear to me that striking about who your employer does business with is a 'lawful' strike.

[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/strikes

Anyway I have no objection to them taking things to the NLRB, I just don't think they will win. I suspect google will settle by paying some or most of the terminated employees some severance or some other token gesture and will consider themselves lucky to be rid of activist employees.

The Google Walkout in the wake of Andy Rubin, David Drummond etc was far more disruptive to their business yet Google on paper felt they got a great deal on the severance packages of Rubin and Drummond ($0). Or at least Sundar was proud of how he cleaned up those messes.

The real meat the article (as reflected very clearly in its original title, not the mangled caption that was unfortunately used for the post; and throughout the article body itself) is that Google apparently fired some 20+ employees who either weren't involved the protest at all, or whose alleged participation remains unclear.

As if the higher-ups got together and said to each other: "Ya know, 28 heads just isn't enough. We need to go out and bust some more, to you know, make a point. Plus there's that sound their skull makes when hitting the pavement. I just can't enough of it!"

Google might dispute this - then again Google lies about a lot of things. We'll see how the complaint process goes.

Either way you're going off on an ancilliary aspect of the article, not its main thrust.

Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but there is deep information asymmetry here and google has all the advantage and must have anticipated that this would end up in discovery and litigation and that the records of the terminated people's employment would be subject to it. That means their chat history, their email history and office surveillance footage.

I have a hard time believing that google would have fired people where the sum of their recorded actions couldn't be reasonably construed to be disruptive.

From the article:

“When I got there, there were probably 20-ish people sitting on the floor. I didn’t talk to any of them, I talked to folks who were standing up, passing out flyers, doing other roles,” he said, adding that the protesters were wearing matching T-shirts.

The worker then went back to his desk before returning to the protest around 5PM. “I chatted with them for maybe four minutes, like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re still sitting here! How’s it going?’” he said. Then, he finished the workday from a nearby couch. The worker says he returned to Google the following day without incident. That night, while at dinner, he got an email from Google saying he had been terminated.

They have video and email and message history and badge access times and maybe audio recording and maybe more, who knows.

So far we only have this one person's recollection of the events, where he has a huge bias towards trying to minimize his involvement.

If you read the original article it specifically says he sought out the protestors.

> he went to the lounge on the 10th floor of Google’s New York City office around lunchtime to check out the protest.

Is a single google cafeteria/lounge employee being terminated for happening to be in the lounge when the protest happened? Of course not because that would be nonsense.

If you read the original article it specifically says he sought out the protestors

He was being "Googley" and curious, in other words. And got whacked for it.

From some random snippet attempting to define that nonsense term:

Googleyness is about embracing the unknown. Not just tolerating the unfamiliar, but really appreciating it. Celebrating finding yourself in a place you didn’t expect. Finding the joy in being surprised and dealing with unforeseen circumstances instead of resisting the reality you now occupy

By his own admission he sought to join the protestors (he went to the lounge on the 10th floor of Google’s New York City office around lunchtime to check out the protest) and spent an indeterminate amount of time talking with protestors the first time around (I talked to folks who were standing up, passing out flyers, doing other roles)

Anyway it doesn't matter if he spent 40 minutes talking to them, four hours talking to them or 4 minutes talking to them

He went to "check out", and for a fraction of that time "talk with" the protestors, by the words you are quoting.

To "join the protestors" (implying some sort of direct participation) would of course be something entirely different, and in no way grounded in the description we have.

It doesn't matter 4 hours v. 4 min

An impartial observer of the situation would most likely strongly disagree with that take. In any case it certainly doesn't sound (from the description we have) that the net duration was anywhere near the former value. More likely it was around 20 min max.

So far we only have this one person's recollection of the events, where he has a huge bias towards trying to minimize his involvement.

Could be, who knows.

But from the weird semantic distortions you're attempting to lay over the words we do have from this guy -- it seems you're basically assuming he must be guilty of something awful, and therefore to be lying in some major way, also.

He is. He is guilty of doing something his employer didn't like and they fired him for it.

Or at least they say that. Which may or may not be true. Maybe google is lying, maybe they are lying. I imagine if NLRB asks, Google will be willing to provide the grounds for firing and we'd know who is the liar here.

Seriously, I have a hard time caring about this.

his ability to pay my made up number is about on par with his ability to pay the courts made up number, at this point it's just political theatre and schadenfreude.

I also think these torts are in different jurisdictions, which may impact how the payouts are managed, how bankruptcy's are interpreted, etc, etc.

I think it's well known that the liabilities are far beyond his ability to actually pay.

Of course not, it does mean that we don't have the ability to know if it is useless or nefarious or not.

In reality maybe this doesn't work so well.

Snowden showed they desperately need some light to shine on them once in a while.

Otherwise intelligence agencies have a historically consistent tendency to get a little too laissez faire with people's right.

NRO is probably the most secretive of all of them, but I'm assuming looking at pictures of Russian tanks and Chinese missile silos all day isn't the most civil-rights threatening thing vs storing billions of peoples emails, text messages, and phone calls like the NSA.

Most recently, look at the white house trying to pressure twitter to ban journalists: https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-white-house-privatel...

I can understand why the WH was concerned.

When you give someone a gun, especially someone powerful, especially the federal government, you can not predict who will be holding it in the future and where they will aim it.

I find it interesting that other bans don't get the same concern from the usual suspects, e.g., abortion gag laws, library book bans, don't say gay laws, etc. Should the former president retake office I expect bans of political enemies and more -- the type of abuse that you rightfully fear.

This is a nuanced subject and requires corresponding consideration. We all agree that some speech isn't good for society but remain at odds over what that speech is.

It always blows my mind when someone makes a claim and then cites a source and their source actually proves the exact opposite.

They never acknowledge the self-own.

This isn't universal though. If you go to places where gig workers discuss these issues (say /r/UberDrivers) every post complaining about pay has people saying "if you don't like the fare, don't accept it!" and to be fair there are also lots who are not complaining about it.

In any event, I don't mean to defend uber. I don't favor their model. I would just say that it is NOT universal.

A single Uber driver can and often does do both.

Yes. Abolish the minimum wage. Higher minimum wage forces more people out of the workforce entirely and skews the labor market in favor of large corporations vs small businesses. Amazon can absorb any minimum wage hike you can conceive, they don't want to and they will fight tooth and nail against it, but they can afford it. Your neighborhood pizza shop will go out of business (and be replaced by a Pizza Hut -- paying twice as much but employing 25% as many people and working them 400% as hard) if they have to pay their drivers 15 or 20 or 25 (or more) dollars an hour. Both of these effects, lower labor participation rate and consolidation of the employment market in fewer large corporations, are much worse for society overall.

I reject the "academic consensus" of people who are not a part of the real world.

It has been empirically proven that a higher minimum wage does hurt the lowest paid workers the most by forcing them out of the labor market and raising prices. Now as the other posted not so eloquently pointed out research, especially sociology (infamously in 2006 ~18% of social scientists considered themselves marxists), is a very left-leaning field and there is a lot of disingenuous research. The two most common bad studies I've seen say a very modest minimum wage hike doesn't cause layoffs, which is usually because everything is within the margin of error, or we see studies that say given enough time they see a benefit but this doesn't usually include inflation, forcing those workers to relocate, or a variety of other real world effects. But the fact raising the minimum wage hurts the lowest paid workers is just a fact

Spherical cows don’t work in physics, let alone economics. Minimum wages are suboptimal but starving is worse.

vs getting paid (a little) to get education.

You won't pay now for that 10k/year required meal plan for cafeteria food and 20k/year for hostel-level accommodation but you're sure going to pay for it later.

Thanks for the laugh. Makes for warm and fuzzy memories. My science days are some 30 years behind.

These are effects of the fact that costs of living are dramatically out of control, you can't just infinitely raise the minimum wage to compensate as this is only making the problem worse.

I think this is a good point of view, but, it's important to remember that what the business can pay differs from what it's willing to pay and that larger employers are more able to drive rates lower. Not all businesses are equal and we should favor the ones which bring the most benefit to the most people.

> Arguably a low paid apprenticeship is more beneficial than mounds of college debt.

100%. Remove "arguably" from your comment. Factor in the value of starting earlier and negative value of the debt you accumulate and very few professions truly benefit from a college education and most of the remaining ones only do so due to regulatory capture effects of requiring them and we would do well with reducing those in favor of far more trade-focused education (tl;dr more trade schools, less liberal arts colleges).

The pernicious thing about this is that the net result of all this may be that only people who go through stringent verification processes can post, meaning that the platforms will be even more dominated by large producers and the content will trend even closer to only having caricatures of the extremes with little representation of what people should really expect from sex once they try it in the real world.

Studio productions rarely show typical humans engaging in healthy sex.