Googlers Rally in San Francisco Over Company’s ‘Attempt to Silence Workers’
By: Sarah Emerson
Tags: Labor, Workers Rights, Google, Transparency, Industry

Googlers Rally in San Francisco Over Company’s ‘Attempt to Silence Workers’

‘How can we expect Google to be transparent with its users,’ said one employee, ‘when it’s not even transparent with its own workers?’

Photo: georgeclerk /iStock Unreleased /Getty Images

During a public rally held outside of Google’s San Francisco office on Friday, a large crowd of Google workers gathered to protest two employees being placed on leave this month, allegedly for violating company policies. The protest underscored a growing trend at technology companies, where rank-and-file staff are challenging what they consider to be unethical corporate decisions through organized protests and collective action.

The two employees who say they were placed on leave, Laurence Berland and Rebecca Rivers, spoke at the protest, alleging that they had been suspended without warning in retaliation for opposing Google’s stance on the use of its technology by government agencies and other private industries. Google did not confirm the names of the employees it told Bloomberg it suspended earlier this month.

Berland, who is based in San Francisco, engaged in LGBTQ+ organizing efforts at the company and participated in several worker campaigns, including petitioning the San Francisco Pride Parade to exclude Google from its event this year. YouTube had come under fire for allowing some of its users to target LGBTQ+ persons. Berland said his account was locked after he contacted Google’s community moderators and requested that they stop deleting related posts and questions for leadership on an internal board. He only learned of his suspension after reading about it in the press, Berland said.

Rivers works at Google’s Boulder, Colorado office and helped to create a petition protesting Google’s business relations with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Rivers said she was suspended after accessing internal files and sharing them with other Googlers.

“We have clear guidelines about appropriate conduct at work, and we’ve had a number of concerns raised,” a Google spokesperson told OneZero. “We always investigate such issues thoroughly.”

Berland and Rivers are now awaiting Google’s verdict. On Monday, Rivers announced in a tweet that Google is terminating her employment after an internal investigation. Google did not immediately respond to OneZero’s request for confirmation on her employment status. It is still unclear whether Berland will be reinstated.

“I am proud of what I did and I feel that everyone has a right to know what their work is being used for,” Rivers said at the rally, referring to sharing internal documents with fellow Google staff.

The rally of roughly 200 people — Google and non-Google staff, part-time workers, contractors, and vendors — is part of a white-collar labor movement that’s rippling across the technology industry. Earlier this year, Google employees organized against the company’s decision to hire a former Department of Homeland Security staffer who defended President Trump’s Muslim ban, and pressured the company to end its forced arbitration policy. Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft are witnessing similar internal unrest.

Google has long cultivated a progressive work culture — one where employees can participate in “Bias Busting” workshops and post to inclusive message boards like “Coffee Beans,” a forum for diversity discussion. Google’s liberal culture was tested in 2017 when Google engineer James Damore circulated a memo that claimed women were biologically inferior to men. Damore was subsequently fired for the sexist manifesto.

Workers at the protest said Google is now systematically squashing dissent and intimidating whistleblowers. Last month, Bloomberg reported that employees accused Google of building an internal surveillance tool that would automatically report staff who create calendar events involving many people, saying in a memo that it was “an attempt of leadership to immediately learn about any workers organization attempts.” At the rally, Berland described being asked by Google investigators to identify other workers organizing within the company — a statement met with “boos” and hisses from Googlers present.

Buzzfeed reported recently that Google has made accessing information it considers sensitive, which it calls “need-to-know” data, a fireable offense. In response, employees created a “parody” template for requesting permissions to documents and calendar items that says, “I want to be sure that accessing [the file] won’t put me in the same situation [as Berland and Rivers].”

At Google’s office in Zurich, Switzerland, a guest talk hosted by representatives from a Swiss media and telecoms union in October was canceled by leadership who said they would instead hold their own discussion about labor issues with employees, Recode reported.

And employees recently learned that Google hired an anti-union consulting firm, IRI, after calendar events belonging to a human resources official showed months of meetings with the company, reported the New York Times.

“It’s a brute force intimidation attempt to silence workers and make it harder for us to fight back on issues of systemic racism, sexual harassment, harmful technologies, hate speech on our platforms, and business relationships with organizations that engage in human rights abuses,” Google organizers said in a statement.

Google employees have also used internal activism to oppose Google’s involvement in a Pentagon drone pilot program, its building of a censored search engine for China, and its business ties with the fossil fuel industry. Last November, thousands of employees staged a global walkout over the company’s handling of sexual harassment cases. The company’s contractors in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania voted to unionize in September.

“How can we expect Google to be transparent with its users,” said employee Zach Siegel to the crowd on Friday, “when it’s not even transparent with its own workers?”

Update: This article has been updated to reflect Rivers’ announcement that she has been terminated.