Google’s motto used to be, “Don’t be evil” — which must seem like a cruel joke to the 12,000 employees it just laid off by email, reportedly including long-tenured and recently promoted workers. Google’s communication was so poor that some employees discovered they had lost their jobs when their access badges failed to grant them entry into the office. Brutal.

Daniel Roberts @readDanwrite

Google NYC employees who arrived at the office early this morning stood in a line to test their badges-- if light turned red, it meant you had been laid off. if green, you were safe. 👎

The layoffs account for a whopping 6% of Google’s workforce, the latest in a spate of tech industry layoffs: Amazon plans to lay off 18,000 employees, Microsoft to let go 10,000, and Salesforce to cut about 10% of its over 70,000 employees. Executives blame the layoffs on hiring too quickly early in the pandemic which there’s probably some truth to but if unions were more of a thing and it wasn’t so easy to lay people off, companies would think twice before hiring people on a whim.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Take France, where the leader of the country’s second-largest trade union threatened to cut electricity to members of parliament and billionaires “so that they can put themselves, for a few days, in the shoes of … French people who can’t afford to pay their bill.” (France is in the midst of a general strike in opposition to the government’s attempt to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64.) That’s the kind of pipe you can swing when you have high union density.

Feel Like This Should Be A Bigger Story

How surveillance reform died. Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) joined forces to kill mass surveillance reform in 2020, according to a bombshell report by my colleague Dan Boguslaw of The Intercept. Funny how that intractable partisan gridlock just melts away when it’s for something bad!
Unemployment as worker discipline. Using FOIA, area hero Tim Barker managed to liberate a rather shocking 1996 memo by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in which she says the quiet part loud about unemployment: “In essence, unemployment serves as a worker-discipline device because the prospect of a costly unemployment spell produces sufficient fear of job loss to motivate workers to perform well without constant, costly supervision.” You’ll want to read the full memo in all of its grotesque wonder here.
The Ten Leak Commandments. Lessons learned on how to blow the whistle and get away with it from the Supreme Court Dobbs decision leak case, by my colleague Nikita Mazurov.
War games. In light of the failure to reinstate the Iran deal, tensions with Tehran are rising sharply, a development that should garner much more concern than it has. The U.S. and Israel are undertaking “the most significant military exercise ever held between the two countries…including mid-air refueling, simulated long-range strikes against ‘enemy’ air defenses and strategic sites,” according to Al Monitor’s Jared Szuba. Take a wild guess who that’s aimed at.
Misconduct at highest levels of Defense Department. The Pentagon's then-deputy CFO Douglas Glenn used racial slurs, drank on the job and sexually harassed employees, I recently reported. Glenn is now CFO of the Office of Personnel Management. This guy's job was overseeing the largest budget in the U.S. government by far and is now in charge of the agency that handles federal personnel — after harassing subordinates. You can’t make this up.
Amazon fined for unsafe workplaces. OSHA has fined Amazon over $60,000 for workplace safety violations at three warehouses. “Each of these inspections found work processes that were designed for speed, but not safety, and they resulted in serious worker injuries,” OSHA concluded. The fine might not seem like much — the nearly $1 trillion company can surely afford it — but that’s more enforcement than we’ve seen in the past, so it’s progress.

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Ken Klippenstein

Imagine Getting Laid Off This Brutally