Google employees frustrated after the outbreak of Covid disease in the office

The Google Employees receive regular notifications from the management of Covid-19 infections, which has caused some to question the company’s mandates to return to the office.

The employees, who spoke with CNBC on the condition of anonymity, said since they were asked to return to the offices, infection notices appear in their email inboxes regularly. Staff reacts with frustration and memes.

The company began requiring most employees to return to physical offices at least three days a week in April. Since then, the staff has been Pay for retreat On delegating after they worked efficiently for a long time at home while the company enjoyed some Fastest revenue Growth in 15 years. Google has offered full-time employees the option to request permanent remote work, but it’s unclear how many workers have been approved.

Google’s Covid-19 outbreak in Los Angeles is currently the largest of any Los Angeles employer, according to the city’s public health. dashboard. Deadline.com first mentioned That modern tech giant Silicon Beach campus in VeniceIn California, 145 injuries were recorded, while 135 cases were recorded in the large company Playa Vista Campus.

A Google spokesperson told CNBC, “There has been no significant increase in on-site transmission of COVID-19 on our university campuses. The numbers reported in Playa Vista and Venice reflect total cases over the past few months, not current or active cases.”

Employees filled out Memegen, an internal company photo-sharing site, with notes about the increasing number of exposure notices they were receiving. One memes, voted 2,840 times, displayed a picture of an inbox with the subject of the email from a San Francisco utility manager saying “We’re so excited to see you back in the office!” And a subsequent email subject line reads “Notice of Confirmed COVID-19 Case.”

Another meme with hundreds of upvotes said “how it started” with a rainbow image followed by “how’s it going” and a wall of text saying “notification of confirmed Covid-19 case.” Another showed an illustration of a happy Pokémon touring a Bay Area campus next to another image of a worried Pokémon after receiving a Covid-19 notification followed by a panicked Pokémon with 29 notifications of exposure. Another meme shows a picture of Star Wars character Ray, whose caption reads “I didn’t know there were so many ‘notification of confirmed cases of COVID-19’ in the entire galaxy.”

Some employees said they received a sudden spike in notices from headquarters in Mountain View, California, and from their San Francisco offices after the company held a contract. Celebration back to the officeGrammy Award-winning artist Lizzo performed for thousands of employees at the Shoreline Amphitheater, near Google’s main campus.

The Google spokesperson also noted that the company follows the methodology established by state and local laws in determining the definition of a Covid outbreak, and when to send out emails of exposure.

Last December, Google told employees that they must comply with vaccine policies or face losing their salaries and then losing their jobs. Then in February, before employees were asked to come back, it was like that Comfortable rules About vaccinations as a condition of employment, as well as other rules around testing, social distancing and masks.

But she continued to require a Covid-19 vaccination to enter physical offices.

Now, some Google employees are asking the company to drop the vaccine mandate, arguing that the Covid-19 outbreak continues to happen anyway in offices where employees are fully vaccinated. While they still provide a level of protection, the vaccines are not strong against the highly transmissible BA.5 variant, which is the fastest-spreading variant of Covid-19 to date, the group argues in a statement titled “No Vaccine Mandate,” published this month. It was reviewed by CNBC. (Vaccines still provide good protection against severe illness and death, including the BA.5 variant, but do not provide much protection against infection or mild illness.)

The anonymous statement says the group, which calls itself Google Employees for the No Vaccine Authorization, is frustrated that unvaccinated employees and those who refuse to declare their vaccination status are still banned from offices and other gatherings including offsites, summits and team events . It also claims that some Googlers have not met their teams since March 2020 and some have not been notified of the vaccination policy during the hiring process.

“We have seen waves of Covid – especially since December 2021 with Omicron and sub variants circulating across Google offices with little regard for the state of vaccination. We have seen many fully vaccinated and boosted colleagues calling out for days with Covid. We have seen both panics and good flood responses. exposure notifications received by office-goers”.

Other companies that previously imposed Covid vaccination requirements have dropped them, including BoeingAnd the Intel CorporationAnd the United Airlines, citing a federal court decision to block enforcement of a federal contractor’s executive order requiring the vaccination of large employers who are also government contractors. The group’s statement says it hopes Google’s leadership will do the same.

The group is largely anonymous, although the identities of some of the members are known to CNBC. It claims to have hundreds of employees with tenures of up to 10 years, in roles such as engineering, program management, UX design, education, sales, marketing and finance. It also includes fully vaccinated Google employees who “believe the company’s vaccine policy is an invasion of privacy and insensitive to individual circumstances and risk factors.”

The memo reads, “We are writing to ask for your assistance to a group of Googlers who are still not allowed to return to our offices.” “We are reaching out to you as colleagues and peers because our direct appeals to Google’s leadership have been ignored. When planning an in-person meeting, summit, or off-site, consider how Google employees who have been barred from full participation under the vaccine policy are recognized and included.”