Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’
New court documents reveal how Google ran its anti-union campaign, ‘Project Vivian,’ between late 2018 and early 2020.
A National Labor Relations Board ruling sheds light on a highly secret anti-union campaign at Google, that a top executive explicitly described as an initiative to “convince [employees] that unions suck.”
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, citing attorney client privilege.
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. In late 2020, the NLRB issued a federal complaint against Google for illegally firing and surveilling the four software engineers. Google claimed at the time and maintains that it fired them for breaching security protocols.
In 2019, Google employees discovered that Google had hired a union avoidance firm called IRI Consultants. IRI Consultants is known for assisting employers in anti-union campaigns by collecting information on workers’ personalities, finances, work ethic, motivations, and ethnicity in order to defeat union drives. At the time, Google was facing an unprecedented wave of employee protests and activism for issues related to sexual harassment, contracts with Department of Defense and Customers and Border Protection.