Kent Walker, senior vice president of global affairs and general counsel at Google.

The job may offer plenty of California sunshine and free lunches, but it still has been a stressful week for Google chief legal officer Kent Walker and his in-house legal department.

First, four fired employees, who had been trying to unionize the employees, announced they were filing unfair labor practices complaints against Google, accusing the company of retaliating against them for workplace organizing. The company denied it.

Google did not give Corporate Counsel a requested interview with Walker or labor lawyers Thursday but did offer a copy of the statement it sent to employees about the firings.

"We dismissed four individuals who were engaged in intentional and often repeated violations of our longstanding data security policies, including systematically accessing and disseminating other employees' materials and work. No one has been dismissed for raising concerns or debating the company's activities," the statement read.

A Google spokesperson said the company prohibits retaliation in the workplace and publicly shares its policy. The spokesperson reiterated that the dismissals were for clear and repeated violations of Google's data security policy, including accessing co-workers' calendars and setting up notifications to be emailed about the work and whereabouts of those co-workers.

The ex-workers denied Google's accusation, saying the material was widely accessible to numerous employees. The company fired the four individuals last week, just before Thanksgiving.

On Tuesday they held a press conference to announce they were filing unfair labor practices charges. They alleged they were fired because Google wanted to quash a growing movement among employees to question issues such as sexual harassment, gender and other pay inequities, and the acceptance of government contracts to take part in controversial projects, such as with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.

Employment lawyer Jonathan Hyman, a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland, Ohio, told Corporate Counsel that companies have a number of actions they can take to avoid a union, but firing organizing employees should not be one of them.

"No, absolutely not. That's the first big no-no," said Hyman, who also writes the Ohio Employer Law Blog.

The National Labor Relations Act imposes four "nots" on employers during union organizing, he said. They are: Don't threaten or discipline employees over unionizing, don't interrogate employees about unionizing efforts, don't make promises about benefits that employees will receive if they refuse to organize, and don't engage in surveillance of employees.

What an employer can do, Hyman said, is "give employees truthful and accurate information about how a labor union will impact their ability to do their job."

For example, Hyman said employers can say a union is no guarantee of better wages, benefits or working conditions. But unionizing could make employees lose their current health benefits and keep them from talking directly and openly with management about issues in the workplace.

"If a company comes to me and asks what's the best union avoidance strategy," Hyman said, "I tell them it's providing a good workplace where employees feel respected. Surveys show that employees unionize not because they want more money or better benefits, but because they feel no one in management listened to their concerns."

But labor woes were not the only issue causing stress at Google this week.

Amid intense antitrust scrutiny of its multipronged business by the U.S. Department of Justice, Congress and other agencies, the two founders of Google stepped down Wednesday. Larry Page, now CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., and president Sergey Brin—still the company's largest shareholders—said they would remain on the board. Google CEO Sundar Pichai will now head up both Alphabet and Google.

Meanwhile, Google continues to deal with growing legal pressures, including:

• Worker dissent over the firing of the four unionizing workers and over Google's hiring of a known union-busting consultant. Workers are pushing unionizing efforts in other locales, including Zurich and Pittsburgh.
• Increased criticism and investigations from authorities in the U.S. and Europe about its privacy practices;
• Continued unrest over how the company handles sexual misconduct issues, including the lack of visible consequences for former Google general counsel David Drummond, who is now Alphabet's chief legal officer. Drummond impregnated a subordinate in the legal department with whom he had maintained a multiyear affair. Public reports of the sexual misconduct sparked worker walkouts last year.