From the article:
“When I got there, there were probably 20-ish people sitting on the floor. I didn’t talk to any of them, I talked to folks who were standing up, passing out flyers, doing other roles,” he said, adding that the protesters were wearing matching T-shirts.
The worker then went back to his desk before returning to the protest around 5PM. “I chatted with them for maybe four minutes, like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re still sitting here! How’s it going?’” he said. Then, he finished the workday from a nearby couch. The worker says he returned to Google the following day without incident. That night, while at dinner, he got an email from Google saying he had been terminated.
They have video and email and message history and badge access times and maybe audio recording and maybe more, who knows.
So far we only have this one person's recollection of the events, where he has a huge bias towards trying to minimize his involvement.
If you read the original article it specifically says he sought out the protestors.
> he went to the lounge on the 10th floor of Google’s New York City office around lunchtime to check out the protest.
Is a single google cafeteria/lounge employee being terminated for happening to be in the lounge when the protest happened? Of course not because that would be nonsense.
If you read the original article it specifically says he sought out the protestors
He was being "Googley" and curious, in other words. And got whacked for it.
From some random snippet attempting to define that nonsense term:
Googleyness is about embracing the unknown. Not just tolerating the unfamiliar, but really appreciating it. Celebrating finding yourself in a place you didn’t expect. Finding the joy in being surprised and dealing with unforeseen circumstances instead of resisting the reality you now occupy
By his own admission he sought to join the protestors (he went to the lounge on the 10th floor of Google’s New York City office around lunchtime to check out the protest) and spent an indeterminate amount of time talking with protestors the first time around (I talked to folks who were standing up, passing out flyers, doing other roles)
Anyway it doesn't matter if he spent 40 minutes talking to them, four hours talking to them or 4 minutes talking to them
He went to "check out", and for a fraction of that time "talk with" the protestors, by the words you are quoting.
To "join the protestors" (implying some sort of direct participation) would of course be something entirely different, and in no way grounded in that text.
It doesn't matter 4 hours v. 4 min
An impartial observer of the situation would most likely strongly disagree with that take. In any case it certainly doesn't sound (from the description we have) that the net duration was anywhere near the former value. More likely it was around 20 min max.
He is. He is guilty of doing something his employer didn't like and they fired him for it.
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but there is deep information asymmetry here and google has all the advantage and must have anticipated that this would end up in discovery and litigation and that the records of the terminated people's employment would be subject to it. That means their chat history, their email history and office surveillance footage.
I have a hard time believing that google would have fired people where the sum of their recorded actions couldn't be reasonably construed to be disruptive.