A fifth fired Google employee said she believes she was “fired in retaliation” for her labor organizing efforts within the tech giant, as the company already faces similar allegations from its firing of four other employees just days after a staff-organized protest last month.
“I was involved in organizing at Google and I do believe I was fired in retaliation,” Kathryn Spiers, 21, from California’s Bay Area, told ABC News Tuesday.
Spiers “misused a security and privacy tool to create a pop-up that was neither about security nor privacy,” the email stated. “She did that without authorization from her team or the Security and Privacy Policy Notifier team, and without a business justification. And she used an emergency rapid push to do it.”
I don’t think she would have been fired if she did something like leave union leaflets in the breakroom, but she had to go and use company security systems that she did not have a need to use, or permission to use. She took a tool intended for safety and security and turned it into a personal broadcasting tool. There are other ways to communicate in a company, and if I was organizing a union I’d try and be more secretive and not go on the company intercom or use work computers to do it.
Works Cited:
(n.d.). Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/Business/google-employee-fired-retaliation-organizing-efforts/story?id=67785338.