"Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’", 10 January 2022

A National Labor Relations Board ruling sheds light on a highly secret anti-union campaign at Google...

The campaign was called Project Vivian, and ran at Google between late 2018 and early 2020 to combat employee activism and union organizing efforts at the company, according to court documents.

Google’s director of employment law, Michael Pfyl, described Project Vivian as an initiative “to engage employees more positively and convince them that unions suck.”

In his January 7 ruling, a NLRB judge wrote that Google must “immediately” produce 180 internal documents that he reviewed related to Google’s Project Vivian campaign, including the document with Pfyl’s description. Google has so far refused to hand over these documents to an attorney representing aggrieved former Google employees...

The fired employees filed a subpoena for these documents as part of an ongoing NLRB lawsuit against the company. Google fired the workers in 2019 after they organized against the company’s contracts with immigration detention agencies...

“The underlying case here has nothing to do with unionization, it's about employees breaching clear security protocols to access confidential information and systems inappropriately,” a Google spokesperson said. “We disagree with the characterization of the legally privileged materials referred to by the complainants. As we’ve stated, our teams engage with dozens of outside consultants and law firms to provide us with advice on a wide range of topics, including employer obligations and employee engagement. This included IRI Consultants for a short period. However, we made a decision in 2019 not to use the materials or ideas explored during this engagement, and we still feel that was the right decision."

Earlier this year, Google identified 1,507 documents pertaining to the subpoena request for documents related to Google’s anti-union campaign.