Some employees are questioning the company's return-to-office mandates due to notifications from management of Covid-19 infections.
The employees, who spoke with CNBC on the condition of anonymity, said that since they have been asked to go back to work, infections pop up in their email inboxes. The employees are reacting to something.
Most employees were required to return to their physical offices at least three times a week in April. After the company enjoyed some of its fastest revenue growth in 15 years, staffers have pushed back on the mandate. It is not known how many full-time employees have been approved to work from home.
The Covid-19 outbreak in Los Angeles is the largest employer in the city. The tech giant has two campuses, one in Venice, Calif., and the other in PlayaVista, Calif., according to a report by Deadline.com.
There has not been a significant increase of on-campus COVID-19 transmission, according to a spokesman for the company. Current or active cases are not reflected in the numbers that have been reported in PlayaVista and Venice.
Staffers at the company have been sharing a meme about the increased number of vaccine notifications. One meme, which was upvoted 2,840 times, showed a photo of an inbox with an email subject from a San Francisco-based facilities manager stating, "We're so excited to see you back in the office!"
A meme with hundreds of votes said "How it started" with an image of a rainbow arch followed by "How it's going" and a wall of text. There was an illustration of a happy Pokemon touring a Bay Area campus next to another photo of a worried Pokemon after getting a Covid-19 notification. A meme shows a picture of a Star Wars character, with the caption, "I didn't know there was this much notification of confirmed carbon dioxide cases in the whole galaxy."
There was a spike in notifications from the Mountain View, Calif. headquarters and in San Francisco offices after the company held a return-to-office celebration.
The company follows state and local laws when determining the definition of a Covid outbreak, and when to send exposure emails, according to a spokesman for the company.
Employees were told that if they didn't comply with vaccine policies they would lose their jobs. In February, before it asked employees to come back, it relaxed rules around vaccines being a requirement for employment, as well as other rules.
It still required Covid-19 vaccine to enter offices.
Some employees at the company want the vaccine mandate to be dropped because of the Covid-19 outbreak. While it still provides a level of protection, the vaccines aren't as strong against the BA.5 variant, the fastest-spreading variant of Covid-19. Good protection against severe disease and death is still provided by the vaccines, but they aren't giving much protection against infections or mild illness.
Non-vaccinated employees and those who don't declare their vaccine status are still banned from offices and other gatherings, according to the anonymous manifesto. It claims that some employees haven't met their teams since March 2020 and that they weren't informed of the vaccine policy during the hiring process.
The waves of Covid have spread through the offices of the internet giant. Many of our colleagues have been fully vaccined and have been called out sick multiple times with Covid. There have been both panics and good natured responses to exposure notifications.
Boeing, Intel, and United Airlines were among the companies that once mandated Covid vaccinations, but have since dropped them due to a federal court ruling.
Some of the members are known to CNBC. It claims to have hundreds of employees with tenures of up to 10 years in various roles. The company's vaccine policy is an invasion of privacy and is sensitive to individual circumstances and risk factors, according to the group.
A memo states that they are writing to ask for your help for a group of people who are still not allowed to return to their offices. We are reaching out to you because we have not been heard. When planning an in-person meeting, summit or offsite, think about how people who aren't allowed to participate in the vaccine policy can be included.
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