A former product manager at Alphabet Inc. GOOGL owned Nest Labs has filed a federal-level complaint against both Google and Nest claiming that he was fired on unfair grounds.
The complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleges that he was fired for posting comments against Nest CEO Tony Fadell and that both Google and Nest are trying to block worker’s voices through illegal surveillance.
The employee was reportedly fired under allegations that he breached Google’s Data Classification Guidelines by posting memes opposing Fadell’s acts on a private Facebook, Inc. FB group.
Nest has been trying to avoid further information leak after some critical memes were published by Recode that reflect employee dissatisfaction over Fadell’s management style, which they believe to be the source of the company’s recent internal troubles.
The plaintiff’s lawyer Chris Baker argued that Google has violated national labor laws that permit employees to protect themselves by sharing information with outsiders and the press. Google lawyers, on the other hand, argued that Google did not engage in any law violation.
News website The Information reported on Thursday that the complaint was filed on May 18 and that Brian Katz, Google global-investigations team manager and former State Department special agent, unveiled an internal whistleblower website to Nest employees in a meeting to encourage them to report their grievances to management instead of airing them in public.
If NLRB eventually finds the fired employee’s claims to be fair, Nest might have to re-hire him and pay him back wages. Not only this, Google and other tech companies could be forced to change their confidentiality rules and media policies.
At present, Google has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Better-ranked stocks in the broader technology space are CommVault Systems, Inc. CVLT and LG Display Co., Ltd. LPL each sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).
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