Google appears to have reached a settlement with six engineers over their allegations that the company fired them because of their ideology. Details of the settlement remain under private agreement, but four of the employees allegedly fired in retaliation for their labor activism in 2019 will not be reinstated, while one still works at the tech giant.
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Four employees, Rebecca Rivers, Laurence Berland, Paul Duke and Sophie Waldman, filed labor charges against Google in 2019 after the company said they were fired for violating its data security policies. Before their firings, they spoke out against some of Google’s ethically questionable choices, including its cooperation with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) despite the agency’s treatment of immigrants and enforcement of family separation policies. Berland reached a settlement with Google last year.
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Another employee, Kathryn Spiers, was fired shortly after for creating internal pop-ups saying that “Google employees have the right to engage in protected coordinated activities.” The pop-up would appear when employees viewed Google’s internal employee or visited the website of IRI Consultants, an anti-union firm hired by Google. Google says Spiers was fired because she did not receive proper approval for the code she used to create the alert.
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In 2020, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a complaint against Google, alleging that the company illegally spied on Berland and Spiers before firing them, and said that Google “unquestionably violated” labor laws by firing Waldman, Rivers, and Duke. The NLRB took the tech giant to trial last year, and during the two-year legal battle, the NLRB exposed something called Project Vivian, Google’s secret union-busting initiative. In January, the court ordered Google to turn over more internal documents that the company tried to hide by claiming attorney-client privilege.
Last November, Waldman, Rivers and Duke filed a separate lawsuit against Google, claiming they were contractually obligated to follow the company's infamous "don't be evil" policy, which is why they protested Google's contract with CBP. That lawsuit was dropped as part of the settlement, according to the New York Times.
