SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc’s Google fired a security engineer on Friday after she used an internal alert system to remind colleagues that they had the right to take collective action.
FILE PHOTO: The Google logo is pictured at the entrance to the Google offices in London, Britain January 18, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKay
Kathryn Spiers, a two-year member of the security team recently working on the Chrome browser, said she had authority to use the system to alert employees to new policies. In this case, she was drawing attention to the company’s declaration that workers could organise and discuss various workplace issues without retribution.
Google posted a list of such rights in September, settling a complaint brought by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Spiers’ alert triggered a pop-up inside the Chrome browser if employees visited an internal policy page or the website of a firm involved in attempts to break unions elsewhere and recently consulted by Google.
“The issue here is that a security engineer misused a security and privacy tool to create a pop-up that was neither about security nor privacy,” a spokeswoman said on condition she not be named. “This person did that without authorization and without a business justification.”
Spiers was suspended the same day that four activist colleagues were fired, during Thanksgiving week. After repeated questioning by Google staff, she was dismissed.
“I expected it to be a controversial change, and I didn’t expect it to be added forever, but I also didn’t expect to be fired over it,” Spiers said in an interview.
The Communications Workers of America (CWA), a union that filed an NLRB complaint on behalf of the other four fired workers, filed a new complaint late on Monday for Spiers.
The union argued that the firing was illegal because it aimed “to quell Spiers and other employees from asserting their right to engage in concerted protected activities.”
Google said it would have acted the same if Spiers had posted something else.
Google said the action was worse because Spiers used an emergency mechanism to install the pop-up warning without a second person approving it.
The recent firings have galvanized some employees into doing more to rally one another and protest company policies, workers said, and they drew in the CWA after many months of actions. But other employees said their co-workers were intimidated and speaking out less.
Corbear41 on December 18th, 2019 at 03:43 UTC »
I am a union worker from UAW. While you have a protected right to unionize you must follow the rules. The company also has rights. You cant use company materials or tools to organize against them. You can certainly discuss it with coworkers or pass out a flyer but using a work computer to do anything against the company will see you out the door with no recourse. People need to understand the proper way to go about it.
0xFFE3 on December 17th, 2019 at 21:56 UTC »
Okay, so, for reference and context after having looked up more context about this on other sources such as twitter:
There is no approval process for this code* submission, according to her team lead. That part appears to have been made up whole cloth.
This would not be the first time that the app has been used for non-security, non-business alerts, and that appears to be a normal part of the operations.
Her team seems to regard this as a policy announcement
Specifically, this would cause a pop up when visiting either the internal policies page, or the website of a union-busting law firm that google has hired. The popup's verbiage is copied directly from a list that google published in september in response to complaints to the labour board. It is quite literally an alert of stated google policy, which is an explicitly allowed function of the tool.
4. Rather than put her on leave when this happened, months ago, she was put on leave at the same time 4 other employees were fired for union related reasons.
Edit: Someone has pointed out that my point 5 was very mistaken! I had thought that she did this in september, I think because I got mixed up with the list that was posted in september in point 4.
She was pulled from her desk three hours after the change, according to her own twitter, which I in fact did read . . .
edit2: I did not do nearly enough fact-checking to be comfortable with this being a top post in the thread :| When I wrote this, the top 20 or so comments were all very favourable to google, and I expected to be downvoted, so I really just did a quick glance through relevant twitters, chasing the things that sounded off to me, and summarizing what I thought I'd read with very little care put into it. Why put effort into something you expect 3 people to read before it's buried, right?
Ah, oops.
edit 3: *Actually, although me and everyone else automatically thought 'code', it doesn't say that anywhere in the article, or in google's response, or in anyone's twitters.
The particular change was to make a pop-up alert in an extension that does pop-up alerts. I would be very surprised if its list of pop-up alerts was hard-coded.
It is likely she was merely changing something like a CSV file of websites & notices that the extension referenced.
Ie: not code, and subject to the same rigorous review.
Rebelgecko on December 17th, 2019 at 18:35 UTC »
For added context, it wasn't just something where she put up some flyers saying "we have this right" or mentioned it to the person sitting next to her.
She added some Javascript to Google's internal version of Chrome so that it would show a big alert saying YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO UNIONIZE every time a specific website was visited.
Her job was to make a Chrome extension that gives notices to prevent people from violating privacy policies for PII data, not an extension that notifies people of labor laws.