Google's position here is utterly disingenuous. They have been one of the leading forces blurring employees' home and work lives, and have reaped the productivity benefits thereof. But now that it's negatively impacting Google, they're advocating for a strict separation between the two. (Limited to organizing, of course — you're still free to push commits from home or stay late to play foosball with your coworkers and talk about work.)
It's been interesting to watch "center your social life on work" come home to roost for Google. (And to a lesser degree other large tech companies.)
Unionization is the most direct concern for a company, but it's not the first time this has burned them. Actions from the walkouts to the government contract protests have been encouraged by Google's promotion of non-work connections, and enabled their inability to crack down without destroying the entire "work at Google!" narrative.
It didn't get much news focus, but even the Gender Memo story tied into this - totally aside from its content, it was first posted to an internal "Skeptics" mailing list. How could it possibly have sounded like a good idea for a company to have an internal mailing list devoted to discussing controversial ideas and rejecting conventional wisdom? By odds alone, Google was eventually going to run into some outrage-sparking mess like that just by encouraging people to bring their entire lives to the office.
What does organizing have to do with 'blurring ... home and work lives'? Union organizing seems like a focal case of a workplace activity.
I feel many commenters didn't take the time to read the NLRB decision or understand it properly. The NLRB's position (now, and also prior to 2014) is that companies should not be compelled to allow organizers the use of corporate IT if other non-business use is not permitted.
That doesn't mean that companies are allowed to have discriminatory policies that permit some non business-related IT usage but ban use for organizing. This puts email back on the same footing as employer-provided telephones, bulletin boards and photocopiers etc.
I agree that organizing is a workplace activity. But if that’s the case, why should companies be allowed to prohibited it on corporate IT? What other job-related activities are outright banned on company-provided equipment?
Google’s position is clearly that organizing is not a workplace activity. That’s why the point about breaking down the boundaries between home and work is salient. They are happy to blur those lines when it means their employees donating their personal time and equipment to benefit Google, but when it means employees organizing they try to prevent what they see as “personal” use of company property.
I agree that organizing is a workplace activity. But if that’s the case, why should companies be allowed to prohibited it on corporate IT? What other job-related activities are outright banned on company-provided equipment?
It's a workplace activity; but it's not a business activity. By definition, companies are allowed to make rules about employee conduct and, in most cases except workplace safety/conditions, restrict activities that are not business-related when employees are working.
Imagine a company has a policy that says "company mobile phones can only be used for business purposes". So if you're making a sales call or rescheduling a meeting, that's fine - it's a business purpose.
On the other hand, chatting with colleagues about plans for the weekend would not be permitted; nor would calling overseas relatives and so on.
The NLRB has always held that if a company had such a policy on telephone usage then it was also acceptable to restrict the use of that company mobile phone for union organizing purposes. That is because the policy is non-discriminatory.
If the policy said, on the other hand, "company mobile phones should be used primarily for business purposes but reasonable personal use is permitted, but you cannot use the phone for labor organization purposes", then that policy would not be acceptable because it's discriminatory.
The question is whether policies are discriminatory in treating labor organization less generously than other non-business usage.
The case in 2014 created a special case for email, where even if the employer didn't permit non-business use of email, then they still had to permit use for labor organizing. The recent decision simply undoes that special case and puts email back on the same footing as (e.g.) company telephones.
Given Google seems to have a vastly permissive policy on the use of company IT, it seems very unlikely they'd ever be able to restrict use of that same company IT for labor organization purposes; and there is nothing in this ruling that suggests otherwise.
That's fairly interesting, as employers then benefit from the progression of tech over time.
For example, building entrances and break rooms used to be significant places for unions to spread messaging.
With campus sprawl, "work from home", globally spread workforce, etc...that doesn't work.
The equivalent of the physical entrance is now often an employee portal. And break rooms / water cooler chat might now be company email or MS Teams / Slack.
The implications of this for all-remote companies are fairly chilling.
Yes, in principle, staff could put together outside channels, but it's a significant chilling effect. And without legal shielding, even "using corporate email to get non-corporate contact info to unionize" might not be safe. I wonder if this could end up with unionization pressure driving companies to accept more remote work?
Your break room comparison seems apt. The NLRB rationale of "using employer equipment to organize" sounds reasonable, but we're not talking about a consumable resource like using company ink to print pro-union fliers. If the company is already providing a platform for informal/social employee communication, restricting union-related content is clearly not aimed at conserving resources but at impeding union activity.
> the Obama-era standard “should be overruled” and a broader, pro-employer ruling reinstated
Yes, you can never have enough pro-employer ruling. I wonder if the fact that this is Google had any influence on the decision. Would Walmart have convinced the labor board of the same?
Kinda weird they didn't mention which "Las Vegas casino" it was. I didn't read the case, so for all we know it might have been decided the same way without the Google petition.
I imagine the next best thing would be setting up a site/mailing list outside of the company. But I also imagine the company would take action to shut that down anyway. A very absurd situation.
Instead of trying to take it down they'll just make it very difficult for employees to even find out about it. Organizers are going to have to contact people one by one now.
And if you're an organizer relying on obscurity instead of NLRB protections, would you really feel safe starting that process by telling prospective members "hey, PM me your personal email" over a corporate channel?
If your company is too big or remote to talk in person, establishing wholly-external connections is not going to be an easy task.
Google doesn’t want its employees organizing. Why? One of the most crucial things about organizing is being able to contact your fellow employees. Yes the equipment is Google’s, but also I would contend that conversing with your fellow employees is in service to the company, in service of making the company better.
If I am trying to organize I would just send a blast asking everyone to add their personal emails to list. Could google call that organizing and penalize? What if I just wanted a personal email so I could schedule getting a beer.
In many companies purposely sending an all employee email such as that would potentially be grounds for dimisal. I know of people that have been fired for accidently sending all company emails too many times.
What you, as a google employee, want and don't want with regards to the company email (NOT yours - theirs) is of no concern. You'll get what the company decides you'll get and you'd better pretend to like it!
Everyone has a smartphone and a dataplan now. This ruling won’t stop anyone, it will just drive them underground. Secret WhatsApp groups are the future of social networking.
> Secret WhatsApp groups are the future of social networking
That would also mean super-broad discoverability, and a likely change in employment law permitting employers to check employees' personal phones for such groups. Particularly in compliance regimes.
With all the talk about tech trying to unionize, and people being fired for unionizing at Google... Why haven't we actually seen any... you know... unions?
I keep seeing news about this, but I have a lot of trouble buying the argument that it's union busting behavior when I don't see any evidence of anyone actually trying to form a union in the tech world.
(That said, yeah it makes sense that Google and other tech companies would want to prevent it).
I'm not sure I follow your logic. You present as evidence that we see no unions forming. Wouldn't that equally well support the hypothesis that there is union busting behavior going on (to great success)?
You are also ignoring that Google is enlisting a union-busting consulting firm[1]. This seems like furher evidence that union-busting is happening.
Not so. I don't present it as evidence, but I present it as a startling lack of evidence.
Take the other news story in the news today, about someone at Google who made a notification about something to do with labor organizing I guess. I read the blog post and the news article, and I'm just not convinced by the union-busting argument.
I keep seeing things like "X behavior is like posting a flyer on a public bulletin board". So where are the articles talking about people getting fired for actually putting up flyers on a public bulletin board? That's the thing I don't understand. There is a startling lack of unionizing going on in these supposed cases of union busting.
To bring it back to this article, do I think the ruling is bad? Yeah I do. I disagree with the ruling a lot. Maybe there should be some kind of organization where workers could fight against that sort of thing... Hmmm...
