The National Labor Relations Board rejected a complaint by the Google engineer who was fired last year for writing a controversial critique of the tech giant’s diversity policy.
The federal labor enforcement agency said James Damore’s memo was not protected speech as Damore claimed but rather constituted sexual harassment, so the company was right to fire him.
“The charging party’s use of stereotypes based on purported biological differences between women and men should not be treated differently than the types of conduct the board found unprotected in these cases,” wrote NLRB Associate General Counsel Jayme Sophir in a Jan. 16 advice memo recently made public. Sophir said the memo’s statements were “discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding effort to cloak comments with ‘scientific’ references and analysis, and notwithstanding ‘not all women’ disclaimers.”
On Jan. 23, the board officially agreed with Sophir’s conclusions.
Damore, who was fired last year after the memo went viral on the Internet, had argued in a complaint filed in August that the memo was protected by the National Labor Relations Act because of its discussion of workplace policies at Google. Essentially, Damore said he was attempting to engage employees in an effort to improve their working conditions by engaging them in a debate regarding the diversity policy.
The general counsel’s office didn’t see it that way, arguing that the memo itself created a “hostile work environment” that Google was obligated to address and that firing Damore was an allowable response. “The employer demonstrated that the charging party was discharged only because of unprotected discriminatory statements and not for expressing a dissenting view on matters affecting working conditions or offering critical feedback of its policies and programs, which were likely protected,” Sophir concluded.
A Google representative could not be reached for comment.
