Google’s fires four organizers after hiring union-busting firm

[throwawaylolx]

This article is ranked 16th on HN first page right now, and it has 80 points, was posted 4 hours ago, and has 16 comments. A different article [1] is ranked 8th on HN right now, and it has 31 points, was also posted 4 hours ago and it has 18 comments. They were both posted about the same time, they have the same number of comments, but the article that has significantly more points is ranked significantly lower.

If I understand the HN ranking algorithm, this means this submission is heavily reported. This is not the first time I observe this behavior for anti-Google submissions. Is there a different explanation for this phenomenon other than heavy reporting?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21636093

[dang]

I don't know what you mean by heavy reporting? There were tons of submissions of this story, most of which were flagged by users.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21636583 is the main discussion now. That's a better article than this one from the point of view of the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), because pure advocacy posts aren't as supportive of intellectually curious conversation. They're much more likely to start off on a polarized footing and degenerate from there. Also, they don't contain much information. In that way they fall in a category of related things like online petitions, event announcements, etc., that we tend to moderate as off topic for HN.

Certainly there have been plenty of stories on HN that are critical of Google, and they're not off topic, as long as they meet the site guidelines by being intellectually interesting. Note that word 'intellectually' though, because there are plenty of other kinds of interesting, which are fine, but not what this site is for.

[9HZZRfNlpR]

Well before going full conspiracy, I believe a lot of tech people are anti union themselves compared to some other fields. I'm not one of them but as long as there is demand like right now for programmers, the conditions and pay is good.

[flowerlad]

I once posted a story about Google and privacy violations and it reached #1 spot on HN but after about 30 min at the top spot it suddenly moved to page 2. I got the impression that Google somehow has power over ranking here. It could be through reporting by Google employees. But the title of the post was edited too, along with the demotion.

[jbc1]

HN weights stories by novelty to avoid having the front page just being round #4643 of never ending social arguments.

If something appears to be just a minor amendment to an event that's already been represented on HN, it gets penalised. Dang has a comment about it somewhere.

I've already seen posts on here about both Google firing organizers and hiring the union busting firm. It doesn't appear novel and deserves the penalty.

[ljf]

True but you will find that there are a bunch of sites and sources that don't rank as highly as others. The Guardian needs more up votes to get to the same position as a non newspaper site, plus there is the matter of the ranking of the person that posted it, the ranking of the voters, the time scale of the voting patterns, and interactions with comments.

There are loads of things that affect weighting and ranking here. Not that I mind, I largely support the way this community is run, pretty hard thing to keep the site down te as valuable and as interesting as it is.

[jeen02]

Because the article title is extremely clickbaity and wrong. They fired four people because they were repeatedly breaking privacy policies and leaking documents.

[toopok4k3]

Are you suggesting anti-union actions from a US corporation on a news site run by venture capitalist?

I mean... I hope this is not a new revelation to anyone.

[Causality1]

There's definitely a thumb on the scales. I've found that controversial comments of mine that go up and down a lot in point totals are much more likely to trigger the mysterious "you're posting too fast" message even hours after my last comment.

[dataduck]

There has been quite a lot of noise on HN about this, and many of the other posts have disappeared, perhaps in an attempt to stop the whole front page getting swamped by this story.

You can find the other links here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...

I wouldn't normally bother, but the medium article is about the least balanced of the lot. As far as I can tell, the protesters weren't fired for unionizing, in fact they never attempted to push for better pay or conditions; they were fired for harassing other employees in order to further private political agendas. This changes the story somewhat.

[HelloNurse]

Private political agendas? Who are they, the oxymoron party?

[mmcwilliams]

It’s a violation of the NLRA to fire employees for organizing, so it makes a lot of sense that the reasons given for their termination would be something other than “you’re fired for unionizing”. I’ve read the other articles linked in this thread and there’s not much by way of evidence on either side besides Google’s statements but it’s naive to think that the company would outright say that they were violating federal labor laws even if they were.

[DSingularity]

How did you reach this conclusion?

[sunstone]

So Google really has hit the nadir of the wall that Microsoft hit when Gates testified before the Justice department. It's a tough day for all of us Google fan boys but it's time to look in the mirror and carefully consider the current reality.

[me_me_me]

What always baffles me is the term fanboy, how in this day and age do we still have people believing/having faith in a company.

They all did something abhorrent or yet to be caught doing it. And yet we have people who would seemingly jump into fire for a brand (even in face of damning facts).

Is this a form of ancient tribalism still at play?

[idlewords]

What is the nadir of a wall? The baseboard?

[mc32]

You don’t get to organize and sabotage billions of dollars of revenues and get to keep your job.

Google set up this attitude they fostered that worked in attracting talent and productivity. It worked for a time to improve internal issues. But as it creeps and threatens the corporation itself, it cannot continue for management.

But as history has borne out, you have to know when to regain control. It’s the struggle of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, PLA and red guards.

[rocqua]

What has made google look at the facts and think this is the right way to proceed? Do they think this won't blow up? Do they fear unions so much that this is worth the bad PR?

Or is this just a corporate process that no-one took a big picture view on? Because from where I am standing, this just seems like a dumb move.

[otalp]

People will forget about this in a few weeks

[brown9-2]

I think it’s obvious they’ve concluded they have little to fear from the government or the NLRB with the current administration.

[netcan]

Who knows, but plausibly, yes.

The game, as I understand it,^ is a "yes or no" game. Either Google unionisers get a union or they don't. If they do, what that means will be be worked out later.

So yes, Google plausibly don't want a union (or a big union discussion) enough to take chances with bad PR, or labour court. Totally different scales of threat.

^not well.

[netcan]

Currently, with the way labour organising works... it seems to either go nowhere, or go into a (belligerent) dichotomy. Professional organizers themselves often see it as an entirely dichotomous, zero-sum game, an inevitable conflict between opposite interests.

Overall I'm curious about unions. I haven't had much/any direct experience for >20 years. Most of the Union examples we have today are either public-ish sector or some old status quo union inherited from an old generation.

It's just hard for me to picture an old-school unionised version of Google or (more to the point) Amazon.

What is the end game or success case, for a Google union?

[pas]

Labor should try to change regulation/policy to better help people live while trying to find a new job and/or simply unemployed. Forcing companies to employ someone they don't want is not a winning strategy on the long term. (Though worrying about poor poor companies is a bit premature considering how abysmal worker protections are in the US.)

[netcan]

Just to put some practical meat on it... salaries.

Iirc, unions typically insist on a strict payscale/structure combining legible factors like seniority, position, etc. Would they want this.

[Ensorceled]

Google, I’m also not sure, from the outside things seem pretty good for employees. We can see the union end game and how it would work for the minimum wage Amazon warehouse workers who had to fight about not being paid for the 30 minute security screening so these are entirely different.

[PunchTornado]

> One of the workers set up notifications to receive emails detailing the work and whereabouts of other employees without their knowledge or consent.

This is shady/creepy. There is no need to know when and where a colleague is every hour, every day. You shouldn’t be allowed to do this.

I’m glad an employee who does this is getting fired because I wouldn’t feel safe around them.

My calendar is public, but that doesn’t mean you should be alerted every time I go somewhere.

[LeonB]

Google is a company based on surveillance. It crawls the entire world‘s data. It makes money by delivering messages to people you’ve never met based on the intelligence they’ve gathered about the people. They give you free tools for instrumenting websites to gather more intel about people, which is then stored on their servers. And the calendar notification claim relates to using a google product in the exact way it was designed to be used (and reads like lawyers grasping for a safe technicality.) It’s a bit unsavoury imo.

[thundergolfer]

Where are you quoting that from? I just string searched it in the article and got nothing.

[blankety445566]

Xoogler. Several people who were involved in organizing protests have also quit over the past year or so, after posting stories of the retaliation they faced, including being reassigned, getting bad performance reviews and such.

I jumped ship for these kinds of reasons, but looking ahead a couple years. You simply cannot scale culture, especially when culture that prevents it from going full balls-to-the-wall profit. Google is growing at such a rate that it surpassed organic trajectory; it's discarding and digesting its own culture as it swallows up the tech industry and doubles down on surveillance. The technical capabilities of the panopticon it has already built should be the subject of (world) government oversight. Sadly, tech giants have outpaced democracy's ability to recognize and rein in threats to human freedom.

Google's play to be everyone's digital assistant should be recognized for what it nakedly is: a play to absolutely dominate every single person's life and sell those lives to the highest bidder.

[close04]

> Around the same time Google redrafted its policies, making it a fireable offense to even look at certain documents. And let’s be clear, looking at such documents is a big part of Google culture; the company describes it as a benefit in recruiting, and even encourages new hires to read docs from projects all across the company. Which documents were off limits after this policy change? The policy was unclear, even explicitly stating the documents didn’t have to be labeled to be off limits.

Is such a policy legally enforceable or is it relying on the fact that Google can outspend them in a litigation?

[imvetri]

Tech - Past - Leaders were science lovers, humanity saviours, Going past limits of intelligence. Tech - Present - Contaminated with Human management science, economics and anything that gets touched by money. Science based on top of money, is it a real science at all?

Nope.

[thundergolfer]

Is the SA acronym that commonly known? I had to search it, and for those also not in the know it's the Sturmabteilung, more commonly known as Storm Troopers.

Also I'm pro-union and not averse to laying out links between fascism and corporate capitalism, but I think you'd need to add a bit more argument here beyond 'the Nazis also did this so it's definitely bad'.

[9HZZRfNlpR]

Comparing everything with nazis and Hitler is old and tiresome. Waiting for people who don't believe in unions respond you with nazi labor org German Labour Front and how they were socialists and you're back at beginning.

[flir]

Won't somebody think of the megacorps?

[Ensorceled]

I don't think unionizing is "unprofessional". Also, until recently, Google encouraged people to "bring their whole selves to work", so Google kind of changed the rules.

[thundergolfer]

This comment seems in bad-faith, but in case it's not, what is unprofessional about the behaviour described in the article, exactly?

[intarga]

I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm...

If it's not, consider this: If an employer really is fair and unexploitative to their employees, the employees have nothing to gain by unionising.

[mikojan]

Expropriate Google.

[erlag]

Seems there is still hope for Google. Few more actions like that and maybe they will start behaving like a company and not like an ideological echo chamber.

[dabbernaught420]

Did you ever really think that they'd let ideology get in the way of profit?