Google reaches a settlement, under NDA, with six engineers who revealed the company's 2018-2020 anti-union campaign; four fired engineers will not be reinstated
Lauren Kaori Gurley / VICE :
Context & Ripple Effects
This settlement closes a thread that opened in December 2019, when four former Google employees filed unfair labor practice charges alleging they were fired for organizing — the public face of what VICE later documented as a company-wide anti-union push. An internal document showed Google dismissed dozens of engineers between 2018 and 2020 over data-access violations, a period overlapping the activism crackdowns.
The company has since settled these disputes piecemeal rather than litigating them: FOIA records revealed an NLRB-approved settlement with an engineer fired for workplace activism in 2019, and Google separately promised a new union it would not silence pay discussions. The $27M payout over Nest-era unfair labor practices extended the pattern into 2023.
First-order effects
- The six engineers receive compensation under nondisclosure terms, meaning the specifics of Google's 2018-2020 anti-union campaign stay legally sealed even as its existence is confirmed; the four fired organizers remain out of the company permanently.
Second-order effects
- Each confidential settlement sets a template the next aggrieved employee can invoke — the 2019 filers' charges, the FOIA-disclosed engineer settlement, and this deal form a paper trail that keeps pressure on Google's labor practices without any single case going to full adjudication.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, big-tech labor disputes resolve through stacked NDAs and buyouts rather than reinstatement or public rulings, leaving regulators and journalists piecing together campaigns like this one from fragments — and making early documentation of firings the decisive act for worker movements.
The trend: Google is absorbing its organizing conflicts through a sequence of confidential settlements that confirm misconduct while suppressing its details, trading transparency for closure.