As an employee, you have rights. You may not be aware of all these rights, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. And now, if you’re a Google employee, you have more rights than the average employee.
In a settlement with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Google agreed to post a list of rights that employees have. Most of these, such as the right to discuss your salary with coworkers, the right to unionize, and the right not to be retaliated against, are standard rights protected by the federal government. In fact, you should have posters in your workplace that detail those rights.
But, this settlement goes a bit more than those standard rights that we all have and they indicate a bit of what was going on at Google. For instance, there is this (formatting is in the original):
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT to discuss wages, hours, and working conditions with other employees, the press/media, and other third parties, and WE WILL NOT do anything to interfere with your exercise of those rights
To keep reading, click here: Google Forced to Post Employee Rights (Your Employee Should Have the Same Rights)
These rights would not have helped James Damore. He didn’t bring his diversity issues to Google and seek clarification. To the contrary, he used a workplace communications channel to contact certain employees that he thought might be amenable to a junk science screed alleging that women were — biologically — more neurotic than men and less fit for tech work; in essence, gender-based hate speech targeting his female co-workers. There’s simply no way to put lipstick on that pig and end up with anything other than a pig.
That right about “letting” the employees know about being surveyed for activity on work premise. So it is now publicly noted that employees are being watched. What was missing in that list of “rights” was a standard of ethics on how to work with co-workers as a team member whether you wanted to or not as part of the requirement of the job.