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Seems to me there are two issues: 1.) Yellow badge worker treatment -- most of the comments here seem to accept his description of their work life (right or wr
by rmrm 15y ago
Seems to me there are two issues:
1.) Yellow badge worker treatment -- most of the comments here seem to accept his description of their work life (right or wrong) as fact, it is unsubstantiated to me. I see a video of people getting in their cars and going home, that is all. Considering he claims to have never spoken to any of them, except for a brief encounter before security grabbed him, it would seem even he is admitting he does not have first hand knowledge of anything he said. It is an entirely less than complete view (and possibly incorrect description) to which to draw any conclusion.
For that reason most of the discussion seems premature to me. With that said, no luxury transport, no free meals, etc -- does in fact describe the working conditions of 99.9% of Americans. A company treating people normally is not substantially interesting, tho apparently juxtaposition makes it so -- because what is interesting, and has always been interesting about Google, is that they treat their employees extraordinarily well.
2.) Was Google "right" for wanting him off the campus? Sure -- they contracted with his employer to provide some service, not to film an expose about Google itself,made possible only by being on the Google campus with unfettered access to the grounds. I realize he says he did not film it with the idea it would be an expose, but film is shot to be shown, and in his letter he makes it fairly clear what his interest was in filming, the assumptions and/or understanding he had while filming -- which gives a fairly clear picture of why he was filming. And it resulted in just about the kind of film you would expect. That isn't what he was there for. There is nothing that even remotely rises to a whistleblower type defense, as there is nothing remotely illegal about what he claims to be the yellow badge worker treatment. If he had in fact been filming something illegal (or at least in some way out of the norm in a negative fashion, even), my opinion would be more substantially in his favor -- in relation to how egregious the treatment actually was.
- simon_weber 15y agoI also fail to find the treatment of the yellow badge employees surprising or unreasonable. Just like you said, the only reason people find it interesting is because the yellow badges work next to employees with some of the most well known perks in the industry. Why does this juxtaposition come about in the first place? It seems to me that the amount of effort an employer will want to go through to keep/attract a certain type of employee is proportional to how much effort they would have to expend to replace that employee. I would argue it is relatively more difficult to replace campus workers than ScanOps personnel (since campus workers are higher skilled and also must become acclimated to the campus on the terms of the employer, while ScanOps can just sign up and start scanning), Google doesn't expend the same effort to keep the employee. Nothing nefarious is at work; a large profitable company is trying to stay that way. That being said, the reaction Google had does seem a bit over the top, but I would agree that this is mostly the fault of Andrew's tone.