Find Out Why This Google Employee Lost Her Job 9 Days After Joining

A Google data center worker, Tuesday Carne, 29, was fired after nine days of being employed in the South Carolina site due to being "ungoogley." She has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against her employer.

Carne stated that she attended a meeting with the managers during her second week on the job. They discussed upcoming schedules, wherein she learned that employees who worked shifts over holiday periods were entitled to double pay, but only if they had been employed in the company for at least six months.

Carne was not aware of this policy, so she spoke up about it. "I basically said, 'That's bulls---,'" she recalled.

Then, later that evening, a Modis manager sent an email calling out her behavior "unacceptable and ungoogley,'' a copy of the message was viewed by Bloomberg News. Carne was fired.

Carne was assigned to maintain the equipment at a Google site in South Carolina. Google fills many of these roles with contract firms such as Modis, a unit of Adecco Group AG.

She is now in the middle of a new complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against her employer, Modis, and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, another workplace dispute for the world's third-biggest company by market value.

Carne contacted the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), a labor advocacy group. In March, AWU settled another Google labor complaint involving the same South Carolina facility, wherein they agreed not to silence workers discussing pay. The fired Modis staffer from that case, Shannon Wait, was reinstated.

AWU, a group that focused on technology giant's sprawling contract workforce, said that Carne was exercising legally protected speech during the November meeting. Meanwhile, representatives from Modis and Google didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

"I just want my job back," said Carne, who had recently moved from Michigan to take the role. "It felt like the winds were taken out of my sails." Carne said she was paid $16.50 an hour in the Modis role, along with a $200 bonus given during the pandemic, when data center employees were asked to come in regularly.

Workers like Carne are Google's essential workers, argued Rachael Sawyer, an AWU steward. "If anything were to happen to the data center, Google could not function at all," she said.