Open MIC, a nonprofit that works with shareholders to advocate for greater corporate accountability and is helping to organize the proposal, says Mitchell’s firing may have been retaliatory. “The justification they use is ‘this person violated our data security work,’” says associate director Hannah Lucal. “It’s important to lift that up because they use trade secrets and data policy as an excuse for retaliating against worker organizers.”
The sentiment is echoed by the Alphabet Workers Union, which launched in January in part to protect employees and contractors from retaliation. “We want to know that if a project goes off the rails our coworkers who know about it can tell us,” says Andrew Gainer-Dewar, a Google software engineer and union member. “That’s why the safety of whistleblowing is so important. And that’s what we’re trying to build with the union.”