Tyler Sonnemaker/Business Insider
- Google has reached a private settlement with former employee Laurence Berland, Bloomberg reported.
- Google fired Berland in 2019, saying that he abused access to other employees' calendars.
- Berland said Google terminated his contract in an attempt to crush unionization efforts.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Google has reached a private settlement with an employee who said he was fired because of workplace activism, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) approved the private settlement between Google and Laurence Berland, a software engineer, in July, the publication reported, citing agency records obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.
The records didn't list the terms of the settlement.
Google and Berland's lawyer, Laurie Burgess, didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. Google has previously denied any wrongdoing.
Berland was among four employees known as the "Thanksgiving Four" after Google fired them in November 2019. Google said it had fired Berland, who had worked at the tech giant for 11 years, for accessing other employees' calendars. At the time, it said it punished staff "who abused their privileged access to internal systems, such as our security tools or colleagues' calendars."
Berland said during his testimony last week that he had signed up for updates on changes to some of his colleagues' calendars so he could see how Google's work with an anti-union consulting firm was changing its response to internal criticism, Bloomberg reported.
Berland said that he told Google before he was fired that he had accessed the calendars "because I was concerned that our rights were being violated," per Bloomberg.
All four ex-Google employees denied violating Google's policies and filed complaints via the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in December 2019, alleging that Google terminated their contracts in an attempt to crush unionization efforts.
The NLRB accused Google of violating the National Labor Relations Act by terminating the employees. The case is now in the third week of its trial.