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I thought this story had already been reported a month ago. But no, I was wrong, that was the other organizer of the Google Protests, Claire Stapleton: https:/
by AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
I thought this story had already been reported a month ago. But no, I was wrong, that was the other organizer of the Google Protests, Claire Stapleton:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/google-walkout-organizer-claire-stapleton-resigns https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/google-wa...
So to clarify, both of the female Google employees who lead/organized the protests have now left because they say they faced retaliation. That looks very bad for Google.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoWhittaker did not (as far as this article describes) say why she left.
- knd775 7y agohttps://www.wired.com/story/google-walkout-organizers-say-theyre-facing-retaliation/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-walkout-organizers-say-th... >In a message posted to many internal Google mailing lists Monday, Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Research, said that after the company disbanded its external AI ethics council on April 4, she was told that her role would be “changed dramatically.” Whittaker said she was told that, in order to stay at the company, she would have to “abandon” her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at New York University.
- dmix 7y agoWhat retaliation have they faced from Google exactly?
- jakelazaroff 7y agoFrom this article: > In an email to colleagues, Whittaker said her Google manager told her to "abandon [her] work on AI ethics" and blocked a request to transfer internally. From the aforelinked Guardian article: > In the letters, Stapleton said that two months after the walkout, she was demoted and “told to go on medical leave” despite not being sick. The demotion was reversed after she hired a lawyer, she said.
- cobookman 7y agoThe manager feedback was posted in an internal mailing list. It said no such thing. manager asked her to focus on her day to day job. Her ai ethics work was not aligned to the job she was hired for.
- bancars 7y agoDo you have proof of this?
- cobookman 7y agoIf you are a googler. View the ethics-discuss group. And search for Meredith's post where she discloses her managers performance review.
- cobookman 7y agoSry. Source was from a blind thread. Not an internal thread. Mixed the two up https://us.teamblind.com/s/5YFH3CqL https://us.teamblind.com/s/5YFH3CqL
- joshuamorton 7y agoThis is not correct. Her day to day work is/was in the AI bias and ethics space, even within google.
- xyzzyz 7y agoWhy do you think so? Do you have a source of any of her supervisors saying that?
- jakelazaroff 7y agoNot sure why the burden of proof would be higher for this claim than the preceding one.
- AdmiralAsshat 7y agohttps://www.wired.com/story/google-walkout-organizers-say-theyre-facing-retaliation/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-walkout-organizers-say-th... >In a message posted to many internal Google mailing lists Monday, Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Research, said that after the company disbanded its external AI ethics council on April 4, she was told that her role would be “changed dramatically.” Whittaker said she was told that, in order to stay at the company, she would have to “abandon” her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at New York University. >Claire Stapleton, another walkout organizer and a 12-year veteran of the company, said in the email that two months after the protest she was told she would be demoted from her role as marketing manager at YouTube and lose half her reports. After escalating the issue to human resources, she said she faced further retaliation. “My manager started ignoring me, my work was given to other people, and I was told to go on medical leave, even though I’m not sick,” Stapleton wrote. After she hired a lawyer, the company conducted an investigation and seemed to reverse her demotion. “While my work has been restored, the environment remains hostile and I consider quitting nearly every day,” she wrote. Both are now gone.
- duxup 7y agoIf you don't like the ethics council... and you protest it, and then they disband it ... that would involve a dramatic change if your role was on it. Retaliation or not, there would be some change. So any change, not sure I buy is/isn't retaliation.
- knd775 7y agoI don't believe she protested the AI ethics council.
- duxup 7y agoI'm pretty there was some protest surrounding the ethics council.
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
- medecau 7y agoMaybe read the article? > Google soon nixed the board. > Whittaker said her Google manager told her to "abandon [her] work on AI ethics" and blocked a request to transfer internally.
- cobookman 7y agoShe asked to be moved to RMI. No hiring manager in RMI wanted her on their team, and she didn't complete the ladder transfer process. Instead demanding a forced transfer. Could be wrong here, but that's how it was presented internally by Meredith herself.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cobookman 7y agoSry. Source was from a blind thread. Not an internal thread. Mixed the two up https://us.teamblind.com/s/5YFH3CqL https://us.teamblind.com/s/5YFH3CqL
- dmix 7y agoI’m surprised Google’e executives would direct their managers to prevent what their employees are doing politically in their spare time...
- bougalou 7y agoThey weren't. Meredith was employed full time at Google and using all of that time to work on AI Now. It was her work time.
- joeyrideout 7y agoIANAL, but nothing I've read in sibling comments and other threads fits the legal definition of retaliation. Realigning priorities in a way that the employee doesn't like, sure, but not technically retaliation from a legal perspective. EDIT: To clarify, Google's reaction isn't the disqualifier, it's that the employee's action of staging a political walkout isn't legally protected since it conflicts with contractual duties and isn't a typical case of utilizing good faith channels for whistleblowing illegal activity. That type of channel is typically what's protected from retaliation. Not to mention working with someone accused of a crime isn't illegal. Association is a freedom and lobbying to change it is purely political.
- Bootvis 7y agoThat is besides the point. If Google retaliated in any way it's bad.
- BonesJustice 7y agoIt depends on which protections you're talking about (note: IANAL either). From what I can gather, it's true that the organizers may not be covered under laws protecting employees who report concerns internally or file EEOC or OSHA complaints. However, any activities related to collective bargaining (which may absolutely include organizing and participating in protests) are legally protected under the National Labor Relations Act, and would not be affected by "contractual duties" or "utilizing good faith channels for whistleblowing." Whether the organizers were covered by the NLRA is another matter; those with direct reports are likely excluded by the 'supervisors' exemption, which has been expanded over the years to cover pretty much anyone in a managerial role. For those who are covered, Google's actions could absolutely meet the legal definition of retaliation. As an aside, the legal standards for what constitutes 'retaliation' are not the only ones that matter. They may manage to avoid a lawsuit, but they will suffer harm to their reputation regardless. I, for one, could not care less whether the law allows them to retaliate against the protest organizers. To me, this is just one in a long line of reasons why I scratched Google off my "short list" of potential employers.
- joeyrideout 7y ago
- lawnchair_larry 7y agoLooks good for Google to me. These protests were getting out of hand, and their demands were showing some major entitlement.
- geofft 7y agoThey're the people making Google work. Why shouldn't they be entitled?
- el_nahual 7y agoBecause Google gives them money in exchange for said work.
- lallysingh 7y agoA sense of entitlement is part of Googler culture. The inside joke was that this was measured for interviewing candidates.
- qntty 7y agoAnd Google employees do the work that keeps the company going. There's no law that says that people can't refuse to do certain kinds of work. You take a job that you expect to give you work that you find acceptable and if that expectation is violated, you resist.
- geofft 7y agoLiz Fong-Jones (who left Google earlier this year after some 11 years there) tweeted about this last night: https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1150960547803860993 https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1150960547803860993 Of the walkout organizers alone, four out of seven have now left.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoThat looks very bad. On the other hand, if you're organizing a walkout, you're probably pretty fed up already. How far are you from quitting at that point? Probably not very. If you organize the walkout and nothing changes, even if there is zero retaliation, do you quit? At a minimum, this probably indicates that there was not enough improvement, fast enough, at Google. Note well: I am not saying that there was not retaliation. I am saying that this, by itself, does not prove retaliation.
- ketzo 7y agoI actually think organizing a walkout is something you do if you don't want to leave. I mean, if they were really just fed up, they could have just left like you said. I think these people (as a couple have said publicly) really did want to help change Google for the better because they love at least some parts of it.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoI agree that they don't want to leave, that they want to fix it. And yet, they have to be dissatisfied with current conditions, or they would not have organized the walkout in the first place. How dissatisfied? I'd guess pretty bad. Dissatisfied to the point that you're willing to do something that has some possibility of costing you your job. So they want to stay, and yet they're not that far from being fed up enough to leave. (Or so it seems to me, someone who is not at all in that situation...)
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoI mean, the honest truth is: They walked out, made clear demands. Google refused to enact all but one of them. If they stuck around, it wouldn't suggest they were very committed to their goals. I guess my biggest surprise was that there wasn't a second, more severe "walkout" or "strike" after Google declined to respond adequately. The Walkout made news but it wasn't nearly a strong enough action to really say it was all they could do. Most of the people who walked out went right back to their desks after work and kept working.
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago> That looks very bad for Google. No, it doesn't. Just read most of the comments here.
- cobookman 7y agoHow does this look bad for Google? Honest question.
- CydeWeys 7y agoIt's bad to retaliate against workers who organize against sexual harassment and gender compensation disparity in the workplace. It looks bad because it is bad.
- cobookman 7y agoProof of retaliation? I've yet to see anything concrete here. If anything it sounded like they disagreed with the company's business direction. Leaders listened, made some changes. They still disagreed...this time with leadership not feeling a change was necessary. they then quit as they disagreed with the company's direction.
- Jasper_ 7y agoShe was demoted without warning while her boss was giving her high remarks. The company reversed the demotion after she brought in a lawyer. That's retaliation.
- CydeWeys 7y agoThis is a separate issue now though. Just because something isn't completely proven (yet, anyway) doesn't mean that it doesn't already look bad from the outset. And if you listen to what they're actually saying, they're alleging retaliation, not merely disagreeing with the direction the company is going on.
- dmix 7y agoSo as long as you have good intentions you should be free to bring whatever politics to work? Regardless of how, as long as what your protesting the right things everything else doesn’t matter?
- 7y ago
- anonuser123456 7y agoNot clear why you needed to put 'female' in your statement. Are you implying Google's actions are a result of their gender?
- KirinDave 7y agoThey organized the woman's walkout, so it seems relevant to mention that they were women facing retaliation for protesting the treatment of women.
- user17843 7y agoImho it isn't relevant. The implication of OP is that the fact that they are female paints Google in a bad light, not that they were protest leaders. Corporations do not care about gender, it's all about power and control, and they do not care about the gender of those who they have to dismantle to keep it. The Canadian Documentary "The Corporation" is a good example of how corporations behave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw Dividing Media narratives help to keep people from realizing who's their common enemy.
- fzeroracer 7y agoWhy is talking about how women are treated differently in the workplace somehow dividing narratives? And saying corporations do not care about gender is just wrong. Because corporations protect people who harass women. I'm rather baffled by all of the outrage going on because the article mentioned the person was a woman.
- KirinDave 7y agoIf a set of powerful men use the interests to said corporation to enrich themselves at the expense of women who are there, then it is definitely a sexism issue. I appreciate the economic arguments you are hinting at, but they are not incompatible with the notion that sexism was at play. We know, factually, that executives Google broke the law and then we're paid large sums of money to leave. You cannot easily disentangle these power dynamics. Nor should you, because corporations are just large groups of people with special legal permissions from the government. The idea that interpersonal conflict would go away and such an environment seems to contradict the facts and hand.
- dna_polymerase 7y agoNobody needed the explicit mentioning of their gender, nobody did with Damore. She probably was given a nice comp package just so she would leave and STFU about internals. Unions. SV needs unionizing to give employees stronger voices.
- paul7986 7y agoAlso, Google’s R&D blatantly steals innovation from female inventors https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea
- paul7986 7y agoHmmm ...Why is this being downvoted?
- username90 7y agoGoogles patent trolling is gender blind. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-google-is-patenting-work-he-put-in-the-public-domain/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-go...
- macspoofing 7y agoI'm not sure. You can't really be a full-time activist and a full-time employee of a tech company. Both women gained a national profile from the initial protests, it looks like they are attracted to activism, so I full expected them to leave the company and pursue activism full-time. In the specific case of Meredith Whittaker, she's joining "AI Now Institute" a social policy institute affiliated with NYU.
- paxys 7y agoRetaliation or not, if you are so publicly vocal about your employer what other path is there? In fact her activism is going to be more legitimate now that she is not getting paid by Google at the same time.