Google staff members at the tech giant’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, walk off the job to protest the company’s handling of sexual misconduct claims.
Mason Trinca | Getty Moulds News | Getty Images
The U.S. National Labor Relations Board has filed a complaint against Google and its parent train Alphabet, accusing the tech juggernaut of violating labor laws.
The company was allegedly “interfering with, restraining, and coercing wage-earners in the exercise of their rights guaranteed in Section 7 of the Act,” according to the complaint filed Tuesday.
Specifically, the NLRB case chronicles accuse Google of illegally spying on employees, firing several employees in retaliation for attempting to unionize, and illegally screen employees from sharing work grievances and information with each other using general tools kidney calendars, email, meeting rooms, and an internal communication tool at Google called MemeGen.
The NLRB said it assumes an answer from Google by Dec. 16th and the agency said it will hold a hearing on April 12, 2021, in San Francisco.
Google didn’t at the drop of a hat respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
The NLRB’s conclusion comes a year after CNBC first reported that the NLRB had started a new study into Google’s labor practices. It also comes on the heels of a major $310 million Google settlement to an Alphabet shareholder lawsuit which assumed the company had mishandled claims of sexual misconduct by executives there.
The latest investigation stems from employee agitation over the interrogation and subsequent firing of employees, including Rebecca Rivers and Laurence Berland, who had been placed on rash and indefinite administrative leave in November of 2019 for allegedly “distributing business information outside the scope of their tasks”. The week of Thanksgiving 2019, Google fired four employees, including Berland and Rivers, claiming they pieced confidential documents and breached security. The workers filed a complaint with NLRB shortly thereafter.
Shortly after that, Google fired assurance engineer Kathryn Spiers after she created a pop-up notification for Google employees visiting the website for IRI Consultants, a compressed known for anti-union work, which Google had hired. Spiers filed a lawsuit with the NLRB shortly after.
At the dilly-dally, workers got public support from presidential front-runners Sen. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who took to Twitter to bash Google for so-called “anti-union” actions.
The NLRB consolidated Berland’s and Spiers’ cases in Tuesday’s filing.
The agency states that Google unlawfully surveilled staff members “on numerous occasions,” including viewing an employee presentation in support of union efforts, the filing states.
The complaint avows that Google held a Global Investigations meeting in its San Francisco facility where it “interrogated its employees about their kept concerted activities by asking them about their access of employees’ calendars and MemeGen Takedown Documents,” it nations, referring to the company’s internal meme-generator.
It also states a new Google calendar policy that prevented employees from forging events with more than 100 employees or more than 10 rooms was meant to “discourage workers from engaging in these or other concerted activities.”
Watch: Google employees walk out to protest the company’s manage of sexual misconduct