As for Andy Rubin, you seem to have assumed that accusation is the same as guilt. But Rubin was being accused by a former girlfriend he dumped: hardly a neutral party. You never heard his side of the story, but I'll give you a hint: he denied it. A senior exec being accused of some sort of sexual misbehaviour happens every day, women know these accusations are frequently treated as true-by-default without anyone caring about the details and use it. Just look at the FBI's own stats on false rape claims as proven by DNA tests. False accusations by women against men with regards to sex crimes is way more common than for any other kind of crime, like an order of magnitude more common. You can't make any assumptions Google or Rubin did anything wrong here, none of us have enough information.
But finally, the complainants weren't limiting themselves to wage fixing that for many predated their employment, or Andy Rubin's bedroom habits. They're moaning about enforcement of immigration laws. They know they can't convince the general public to vote for totally open borders because it's an extreme policy that would create massive problems, as is abolition of the Department of Defence. So they've decided to try and get what they want by pressuring firms that act as component suppliers. Organising to make democratically chosen policies unimplementable is not what union protections were meant to be about.
Not true, the reason they where trying to organise a union was because they did not feel safe with their employer spying on them [1].
Ironicly they where fired because other employees did not feel safe being spied on. So google obviously recognising that spying on employees is a legitimate safety concern.
https://www.hldataprotection.com/2017/08/articles/internatio...
GDPR also applies to the employer and employee. You can’t log without consent, and „we might monitor stuff“ in your contract won’t hold up in court in Europe if you start invasively logging.
My contract with a German company, specifically had clauses saying that anything on their systems is something that can inspect and/or look at.
We aren't talking a small company here, but one with multiple large sites; which means multiple large workers councils ( basically a union for a specific company location ).
Remember hiring in Germany has to be approved by a Worker's Council and the company has to pay for the council to receive independent legal advice as well.
From the GDPR training I did for working as a software engineer in DE, this is all OK as long as its legitimately required for compliance, explicitly disclosed to the full requirements of BDSG/GDPR and not used for anything other than the stated reasons.
This is a huge contrast to the US where it would likely be completely legal to look at this kind of monitoring and then fire someone under at-will employment law for reading too much news.ycombinator.
These people were using the notion of unions to further their desire to push their POLITICS. They didnt care about safety or pay. They wanted to force the company to stop working with the US government on various contracts.