“Google Hires Firm Known for Anti-Union Efforts”, 20 November 2019

Google has hired an anti-union consulting firm to advise management as it deals with widespread worker unrest…

… IRI Consultants’… website advertises “union vulnerability assessments” and boasts about IRI’s success in [avoiding] a union election despite the unions’ “dedicating millions of dollars to their organizing campaigns.”

Google employees stumbled upon the company’s relationship with IRI in October…

Chloe Cooper, a Google spokeswoman, said the company engaged “dozens of outside firms to provide us with their advice on a wide range of topics.” IRI did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

At the time of the discovery, Google had recently installed a tool on employees’ web browsers that would flag internal calendar events requiring more than 10 meeting rooms or 100 participants.

Many employees believed that … [this] was a surveillance tool designed to crack down on organizing among workers. The company said at the time that it simply wanted to reduce internal spam…

… Ms. Cooper, the Google spokeswoman, said that “to suggest this particular firm had anything whatsoever to do with the recent calendar extension — or any internal policies whatsoever — is absolutely false.”

In August, the company handed down new “community guidelines” that prohibited employees from insulting one another on internal forums and “disrupting the workday to have a raging debate over politics or the latest news story.”…

Then, this month, two Google employees were placed on administrative leave over possible violations of company rules..

Google said one of the employees had searched for, gained access to and shared sensitive documents, though other employees have questioned the documents’ sensitivity…

Meredith Whittaker, a walkout organizer who left the company in July after 13 years, said the hiring of IRI showed that Google had “begun to do what most large companies and bosses do, which is figure out how to fight worker power using a fairly routine bag of union-busting tricks.”

Google said IRI did not participate in any of the recent high-profile policy changes, but would not elaborate on the work it did.