Google on Monday fired four employees who it said engaged in “clear and repeated violations” of the company’s data security policies.
Two of those employees were Rebecca Rivers and Laurence Berland, who were suspended a couple of weeks ago and spoke at a rally attended by a couple of hundred people outside one of Google’s San Francisco offices last week. Rivers, who worked in Boulder but made a trip to San Francisco for the rally Friday, tweeted Monday that she was being terminated. A public relations firm representing the organizers confirmed Monday that Berland was also fired.
A Google spokeswoman said Monday that she could not confirm the names of the four fired employees. But she said an internal company memo obtained and published by Bloomberg, which detailed findings of Google’s investigation, was accurate.
The memo, sent by Chris Rackow, Royal Hansen and Heather Adkins on behalf of Google’s security and investigations team, said, “We want to be clear that none of these individuals were fired for simply looking at documents or calendars during the ordinary course of their work.”
They went on to say that their “thorough investigation found the individuals were involved in systematic searches for other employees’ materials and work,” which were sometimes shared outside the company. “This is not how Google’s open culture works or was ever intended to work,” they wrote in the memo.
At the rally in San Francisco, Google employees demanded that Berland and Rivers be reinstated. Berland and other workers talked about fighting to “save Google’s open culture,” and refusing to be silenced or intimidated. The employees who spoke were activists who had urged Google not to bid on a contract with Customs and Border Protection, had protested against YouTube’s policies at the San Francisco Pride Parade, and more.
Tech Workers Coalition, made up of workers from Google and other companies, on Monday dubbed the four fired workers the “Thanksgiving Four,” and urged others to offer them jobs. In a tweet, the coalition called on “those remaining @Google to speak out against this draconian act. This is meant to scare workers, don’t let it.”
