More information about Google’s anti-union efforts is coming out, thanks to a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Alphabet and Google employees formed a union in January 2021, but it wasn’t without some coordinated interference on the part of the company. According to Motherboard, an NLRB ruling revealed documents that disclosed the existence of Project Vivian.
According to the documents, Michael Pfyl, Google’s director of employment law, said Project Vivian’s objective was “to engage employees more positively and convince them that unions suck.”
The judge in the NLRB case also described evidence in which a Google attorney proposed using a “respected voice to publish an OpEd outlining what a unionized tech workplace would look like, and counseling employees of FB (Facebook), MSFT(Microsoft), Amazon, and google (sic) not to do it.”
In response to the proposal, Google’s HR director, Kara Silverstein, said the company would need to be careful that “there would be no fingerprints and not Google specific.”
According to the NLRB, in the US “it is unlawful for an employer to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of their rights.”
Even if Google didn’t technically break the law, it’s not helping its reputation any. The company has already refused to release 180 documents to the attorney representing four fired employees, employees that organized against the company. It appears Google is even going so far as to defy a judge’s order pertaining to the release of the documents.