Google will likely allow some US employees to return to offices in April
Attendance will be voluntary until September. Listen - 01:28
Google employees might begin returning to the company s headquarters in Mountain View, California, next month. Richard Nieva/CNET
Google will likely welcome some employees back to its offices in the US starting next month, the company said Wednesday, as the company moves forward with its reopening plan while more people get vaccinated for COVID-19.
Attendance at offices will be voluntary for now, and the facilities will be populated at a limited capacity, a Google spokeswoman said. The plan will be contingent on a few different factors, including downward trends in coronavirus cases and increased vaccine availability. The company won t require workers to be vaccinated in order to return to the office but is strongly encouraging it.
Infographic: Tech Workers Unite!
The unionization efforts from workers at Amazon s Bessemer, Ala., warehouse follow several successful union campaigns led by blue-collar tech workers and reflect a general increase in activism among tech industry employees. From Amazon workers slamming their employer’s climate change policy to mass walkouts at Google in protest of the company’s handling of sexual harassment, the tech workforce has become more and more vocal in recent years.
According to Collective Actions in Tech, a project documenting actions from workers in the global tech industry, the number of protests, walkouts, open letters and other collective actions in the industry has risen steeply in recent years. In 2020, the website tracked 124 such incidents, up from a combined total of 68 between 2015 and 2018 and from 115 in 2019.
Amazon will bring employees back to offices over the summer
Most will be back by fall, the company tells workers in a memo. Listen - 00:49 James Martin/CNET
Amazon in an internal memo this week gave its employees a sense of when they ll be returning to offices, as previously reported by CNBC. As coronavirus vaccines become more widely available, the company will bring people back through the summer, with mostly back by early fall.
The e-commerce giant s warehouse workers have gone into work throughout the pandemic, which helped it earn record profits in 2020.
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Supreme Court ruling: Facebook s automated texts don t violate robocalling laws
In a 9-0 decision authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court barred a proposed lawsuit against Facebook over automated text messages. Listen - 01:41 James Martin/CNET
The US Supreme Court on Thursday issued a unanimous ruling in favor of Facebook, finding that the social media giant isn t violating the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act when it sends out automated text messages. The court noted that the 1991 law, which was written to curb robocalls, wasn t intended to apply to new, internet-based technologies.
The ruling bars a proposed class action lawsuit against Facebook, which a federal judge had already tossed out in 2019. The plaintiffs, led by a Montana resident named Noah Duguid who had received numerous password reset texts from Facebook despite never using the service, appealed to
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