Activists Employees Had No Rights Telling Google Which Clients To Engage With Court Hears
Activist Google employees, who think they have a right to say which clients Google engages with have been slammed by the big search Company who overnight claimed that they have no legal right to protest the company’s choice of clients.
Legal counsel for the Company told a judge hearing a case over after the firings of activists that “Even if Google had, for the sake of argument, terminated the employees for their protest activities — for protesting their choice of customers — this would not violate the Act,” Google’s attorney Al Latham said in his opening statement in a case that will decide whether Google violated the US National Labor Relations Act.
National Labor Relations Board prosecutors claim that Alphabet the owners of the Google business violated federal law by illegally firing five employees for their activism.
Bloomberg reported that three of those workers’ claims had originally been dismissed under President Donald Trump, because agency prosecutors concluded that their opposition to the company collaborating with immigration enforcement wasn’t legally protected, according to their lawyer.
But that decision was reversed after President Joe Biden fired and replaced the Labor board’s general counsel.
Google has been plagued by a wave of activism by employees who think they have a right to dictate how the business is run.
Many of the left-wing activists have complained about the treatment of sub-contracted staff, handling of sexual harassment, and a contract with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.
The activists not only want to tell Google management how the Company is run, but how the business should express their political leaning.
It’s also been revealed that one of the fired workers accessed internal information about the business and circulated a petition against the information they had obtained without permission.
Google has denied wrongdoing, saying in a statement overnight that it encourages “open discussion and debate” but terminated staff in response to violations of its data security policies.
“Google terminated these employees not because of their protest as such, but because in the pursuit of their protest, they accessed highly confidential information that they had no right to access,” its attorney told the judge.
In the USA Federal Labor law prohibits retaliating against employees for collective action related to their working conditions.
However, the appointment of a left-wing Joe Biden Government in the USA resulted in President Bidens appointees taking a different view than their Trump-era predecessors.
Latham said he isn’t aware of any case in the Labor board’s eight decades of existence in which it has held “an employer’s choice of customer” to be an issue workers have a right to protest.
“What we have here is a protest that does not seek to improve employees’ terms and conditions of employment,” but rather “a purely political protest that sought to use Google’s government contracts, or potential government contracts, as leverage,” he said.