The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling sheds light on a top secret anti-union campaign at Google, which the top manager set out to "convince employees that unions suck." According to court documents, the Project Vivian campaign ran at Google from late 2018 to early 2020 to tackle employee activism and union organizing efforts.
Google's director of labor law Michael Pfiel described the Vivian project as an initiative that aims to "more positively engage employees and convince them that unions suck."
In his January 7 ruling, the judge wrote that Google must "immediately" provide 180 internal documents related to the Google Project Vivian campaign, including a document describing Pfile. Google still refuses to pass this data on to a lawyer representing former employees of the company.
Google fired these workers in 2019 after they organized themselves against the company's contracts with immigration agencies. In late 2020, the NLRB filed a federal complaint against Google for illegally firing and spying on four software engineers. The company claims it fired them for violating security protocols.
In 2019, Google employees discovered that Google had hired IRI Consultants to fight unions. IRI consultants are renowned for assisting employers in anti-union campaigns by gathering information on employee personalities, finances, work ethics, motives, and even ethnicity of employees.
For example, a Google lawyer suggested publishing an article on the consequences of the emergence of trade unions. Kara Silverstein, director of human resources, said she "liked the idea" of the article, but it should be done in a way that "doesn't have Google traces or specifics." Ultimately, IRI Consultants provided the proposed project.
According to the documents, the decision to hire IRI was not made by lawyers, but by a group including Silverstein and Daniel Brown, Google's vice president of employee engagement.
Project Vivian also included a discussion of Google employees' opposition to compulsory arbitration. The company agreed to end the procedure in February 2019 following employee protests.
A Google spokesman commented on the published data: “We disagree with the characterization of the legally protected material referred to by the applicants. As we said, our teams work with dozens of external consultants and law firms to provide us with advice on a wide range of issues, including employer obligations and employee engagement. This included short term IRI consultants. However, in 2019, we made the decision not to use the materials or ideas learned during this interaction, and we still believe that was the right decision. ”
In early 2021, hundreds of workers at Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced that they had formed an Alpha Global union open to all employees and contractors of the company with Communications Workers of America. The union did not hold formal elections to the National Labor Relations Board and was not recognized by Google. Alpha Global has become part of the UNI Global Union, an international federation of trade unions, representing a total of 20 million employees across companies.
In February 2021, Google was ordered to pay nearly $ 4 million in a dispute over employment discrimination.
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