No Tech for Apartheid: Google Workers Arrested for Protesting Company’s $1.2B Contract with Israel
No Tech for Apartheid: Google Workers Arrested for Protesting Company’s $1.2B Contract with Israel
You're viewing a single thread.
Am I being an idiot for thinking that protesting like this, when the union is relatively small is counterproductive? I'd think I'd want to represent the majority of the workers, then protest or outright strike which will halt the cloud operations they want to halt, if that's what the majority of union members vote to do.
Well, it made the national news, so seems like it was somewhat effective.
I'm sure they'd love to have enough supporters to do a general strike, and those have been proposed and attempted over Gaza. Unfortunately, opposing Israel's genocidal actions is not the mainstream view... especially being opposed enough to participate in activism. With only a handful of people, these sit-ins were able to disrupt the company and make news.
So You think they shouldn't have done anything, because the union is not big enough? Moral is not an option with a small union? Am I getting this right?
I think it depends on the goal. If I'm trying to stop a corporation from doing something profitable a large union, one that contains most corpo workers, including the ones producing this profit, can strike, halting the production that generates this profit. The union could do this for a moral reason. If the union however contains for the sake of argument 1% of the workers and none of the ones doing the work in question, then staging a protest can't force a stop to the morally reprehensible production. It also makes this 1% an easy target to get rid of thus making it harder to organize more workers needed to stop production. So if I wanted to gain this power over the corpo, I would probably protest outside of union capacity.
E: They're already gone..
Yeah, american employee protection sucks ... Where I live you could easily fight being fired for this. So maybe thats where our different stances come from.
If there is a criminal charge or conviction I think you would be fired in most countries.
This is probably why they called the cops, so they can fire them for an obvious cause and not have to deal with any questions.
What would be the crime here? Am I missing something? Protesting is not (or shouldn't be) against the law, as long as you don't behave illegally)
Reports seems to indicate that they were arrested for trespassing.
Ah that, yeah they were in the CEOs office. That might be misdemeanor, but is it a felony? Pretty sure you couldn't be fired for this here.
I don't know, but it seems that at least it is enough to be arrested.
Could be
In the U.S., you can be fired for practically anything.
Yeah, probably
Doesn't matter, even if it was just two workers it's still protected concerted activity which is illegal to retaliate against.
Trespassing is not a protected form of protest. Wtf are you talking about?
Indeed not. I was commenting on the scale of protestors, not trespass.