Google said it has fired an employee for revealing worker identities and personal details and sent two others on leave for breaking company policies, proof of increasing tension between management and staff.
Google said it was reassessing the staff on leave. One of them had been exchanging confidential documents outside the context of their employment, while the other was monitoring specific personnel schedules involved in social media, human resources, and marketing departments, it said.
The monitoring has made the department workers feel unsafe, a company spokesperson said. Google did not identify the terminated contractor or the staff on vacation.
The statement from the company came after Bloomberg News asked about two employees being placed on leave who had been involved in Google activism.
In the last week, the suspensions have been a hot topic of discussion at the organization, sparking outrage among some staff and triggering allegations that Google is firing people who have taken a stance against management, according to three employees familiar with the issue. Two of the employees said that the suspended workers were based in the U.S.
The incident at Google's Alphabet Inc. is the latest sign of disharmony and follows a turbulent month in which some staff suspected bosses of trying to suppress internal discussions and shut down labor rights meetings.
At least some of the problems arose from Google's new community guidelines released in August to reduce employee incivility.
Employees familiar with the matter said they had been informed that one of the employees on leave was being punished for having access to business files that were at the core of a recent controversy.
The reports addressed a mandatory device recently installed on employees' machines in the Google Chrome app, staff said. Several Google employees raised concerns in October that the Chrome extension was an internal tracking tool designed to monitor their opposition movement attempts.
According to an internal memo detailing questions about the system, it would immediately notify workers who build a calendar activity with more than 10 rooms and 100 people. A spokesperson from the company said the change was just an attempt to reduce abuse in the organization.
The company said no one was forced on leave to access or open a single need-to-know document; instead, the company said one person was put on leave to search, access and share a wide range of company documents.
Some staff on an internal Google message board suggested that the suspensions were a death knell for the culture of openness that historically defined the workplace of the company.
