Google Had Secret Project To 'Convince' Employees 'That Unions Suck'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the website, which states that a top executive explicitly described as an initiative to "convince" employees that unions suck. According to court documents, the campaign was run at the company between late last year and early 2020 to fight employee activism and union organizing. Michael Pfyl, the director of employment law at the company, described the project as an effort to engage employees more positively and convince them that unions don't work.

A judge at the National Labor Relations Board wrote in his January 7 ruling that he had reviewed 180 internal documents related to the project and that they must be produced immediately. The documents were refused to be handed over to the attorney because of attorney client privilege. The fired employees filed a subpoena for the documents as part of the lawsuit. The workers were fired by the company after organizing against their contracts. The National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against the company for illegally firing and surveilling the four software engineers. At the time, they were fired for breaching security protocols. Iri Consultants, a union avoidance firm, was hired by Google. Iri Consultants is known for helping employers defeat union drives by collecting information on workers' personality, finances, work ethic, and ethnicity. At the time, there was an unprecedented wave of employee protests and activism for issues related to sexual harassment, contracts with the Department of Defense and Customers and Border Protection.

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In his ruling on the documents, the judge describes a situation where an attorney for a tech company proposed to find a "respected voice to publish an OpEd outlining what a unionized tech workplace would look like, and counseling employees of Facebook and Microsoft." Kara Silverstein, the human resources director at Google, said that she liked the idea of the op-ed, but that it should be executed so that there would be no fingerprints. The judge's report states that IRI Consultants provided a draft of the op-ed to the attorney. According to the secret documents, the decision to hire IRI was made by a group of non-attorneys, including Silverstein, who is the human resources director. The judge's report says that Project Vivian included discussions of the opposition of employees to mandatory arbitration. The end of forced arbitration was a key point for employee activists at the company. The company agreed to end mandatory arbitration in February of 2019.

The underlying case is not about unionization, it's about employees breaching security protocols to access confidential information and systems. The legally privileged materials referred to by the complaints are not characterizations we agree with. Our teams engage with dozens of outside consultants and law firms to provide them with advice on a wide range of topics, including employer obligations and employee engagement. IRI Consultants were included for a short time. We decided not to use the materials or ideas explored during this engagement in the year 2019.