8 ms·

Google Says Staff Have No Right to Protest Its Choice of Clients

78 points by gorbachev 5y ago

0xdeadb00f 5y ago
Protest by leaving google. If everyone who is doing this protest left, would Google have that many staff to make up for the ones that left? This solution is incredibly flawed, I'm aware. But just a thought.
- Goety 5y ago
  >Google have that many staff to make up for the ones that left? Yes
vondur 5y ago
If enough of their quality engineers quit, they’d probably reconsider that policy.
- tmpz22 5y ago
  But my team is one of the good teams it’s the other teams that are bad! /s
- randyrand 5y ago
  That's exactly what they want - for these engineers to no longer work at Google. That's why they fired them. Quitting is probably preferred.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
aaomidi 5y ago
Google workers should seize the means of production and unionize.
- azornathogron 5y ago
  Do you mean, for example, by creating the Alphabet Workers Union? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Workers_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Workers_Union
ffggvv 5y ago
i’m just imagining boeing or raytheon employees protesting they don’t want to work with the government. what midwits
- nix23 5y ago
  Uhh, our Cruise missile flown the wrong way, i demand... ;)
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  I did quit a defence company because they started working with a government I didn't want to work for. These things happen. Then again, I find it strange to refuse working for your own government.
  - ffggvv 5y ago
    quitting is the honorable thing to do. doing a "walk out" when youre working from home and no one knows if youre at your desk at not while continuing to collect a salary is just virtue signaling
aaron695 5y ago
This is a good example of Bullshit jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs) These type of employees are just the start of a lot of bad apples. A bit like a cancer, how do you fire (or not hire) just people like this? And you can't really blame Google, when they chose "Don't be evil" they didn't predict how evil social media (Twitter) would make people. And that's it, just because you know about Bullshit jobs there doesn't seem like a solution. Google needs to cull tens of thousands of employees, what more can they do than hope they quit. More likely the good ones will quit and go to agnostic companies because Google lets people like this stay.
inglor_cz 5y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if the employees in question were relatively fresh graduates. At the college, student petitions are taken much more seriously by administrations. But that has a lot in common with obscene tuition charged to the same students by the same administrations. People will generally be more open to demands from those who directly contribute money to their salaries. The dynamics at a place of employment is very different - especially in case of entities that so far have shown no difficulties in attracting replacement talent.
- iamevn 5y ago
  The four employees Alphabet fired near the end of 2019 were Laurence Berland (SRE, 11 years at Google), Paul Duke (SWE, 8 years at Google), Rebecca Rivers (SWE, 4 years at Google), and Sophie Waldman (SWE, just under 2 years at Google). Not sure how soon out of college any are or where else they've worked before Google but I don't think they're fresh grads.
YmiYugy 5y ago
So many companies including Google use "make the world a better place", or "make a difference" terminology in their recruitment. There are also a huge number of people that will chose a job over a higher paying one for the supposed purpose it provides. The choice of clients absolutely affects people's perception of their purpose and it is thus a completely ludicrous idea to me that Google's choice of clients doesn't affect workplace conditions.
sunstone 5y ago
In theory this is correct. In practice, when all your assets leave the building via the elevator every afternoon, it's not like running a gold mine. In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
iamevn 5y ago
The idea that these people accessed highly confidential information is laughable. They looked at people's calendars and read docs that were set to be visible to everyone internally. They found that Alphabet was working with firms that do union busting things and tried to gather support to start a union. Alphabet retaliated against them swiftly and made efforts to smear their names internally. As part of the fallout from this, one small but important part of company culture was broken. It used to be that almost all docs were visible to all employees and exceptions were locked down with the access controls docs gives you. Any design docs, roadmaps, etc. you were curious about was very likely to be accessible. Maybe you were considering using a service for your stack and wanted more detail or context, maybe you are considering switching teams and want to see what they're up to, maybe you're just curious and want to learn about something new. Soon after these people were fired the default was swapped to things being very locked down and most people do not think to open it up to more than the reviewers/teammates that need access. (I'm also of the opinion that the notice that them NLRB required Alphabet post in-office was not sufficiently visible as all of the offices I've been in had them tucked away in places like the mail room but that's just me)
mikewarot 5y ago
So if Google decides to provide services to the firm of Orwell, Godwin, and Marx, to help correct certain ungood thought related to our conflict with EastAsia (who we have always been at war with!) the employees had better just sit down and shut up?
jaytaylor 5y ago
That isn't very Google-y of them! Where can we report the cultural violation? /me laughs Seriously though: > “What we have here is a protest that does not seek to improve employees’ terms and conditions of employment,” but rather “a purely political protest that sought to use Google’s government contracts, or potential government contracts, as leverage,” he said. > Google violated the law “to discourage employees from engaging in” legally-protected activism, according to a July complaint issued by labor board prosecutors. How hard will the Labor Board fight to protect employee political speech? It seems like a different level of concern compared to pursuing reasonable working conditions for workers.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  Where the hell does it say Google or any employer has the right to make up exclusions to the right to organize? Protecting employee interests is a basic right, and if the employer could define the set of valid interests, it would completely negate all protections. Quoting from the law that I believe this is based on: "RIGHTS OF EMPLOYEES Sec. 7. [§ 157.] Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection..." https://www.nlrb.gov/guidance/key-reference-materials/national-labor-relations-act https://www.nlrb.gov/guidance/key-reference-materials/nation...
  - dekhn 5y ago
    Are you suggesting that, with the existence of these laws, Google is not allowed to prevent employees from spiking business deals? I don't think that's how that law works, although it's not well tested in this scenario. Unless the employees could articulate a specific harm, judicial system will not be sympathetic to them.
    - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
      Google is not allowed to prevent employees from organizing with each other and from collectively bargaining with Google, regardless of whether that ends up preventing business deals. Making a business deal is not an excuse for breaking the law.
tomklein 5y ago
I think one of the major advantages a tech company can have against their competitors is their culture and recently, Google seems to be losing out on this a lot. IMHO there is a huge difference between companies that just have workers and companies that are a group of people working towards a common goal/vision
- john_yaya 5y ago
  What happens when that common goal is antithetical to the company’s ability to turn a profit?
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    It would be bad for the company. Do you think Google is at risk of not being able to turn a profit?
    - dekhn 5y ago
      If they forgo all the defense spending in the US and it goes to Azure and AWS instead, it will leave Google a perpetual third-runner. I'm generally of the opinion that Google (leadership) can select the customers they want to take on in cloud (such as defense), with whom they want to work on, so long as they're not breaking laws in the places the data is stored or processed. And googlers who don't like that should quit in protest rather than trying to muck things up on the inside. Does that mean that forgoing defense contracts mean Google won't profit? Probably not, but cloud services aren't just about profit.
    - austhrow743 5y ago
      I certainly do. Not based on losing the revenue generated directly by U.S. Customs and Border Protection contracts or any other government agency, but based on having icy/arms length relations with governments. It's very important to them that governments dont see them as a problem and start looking at all the different ways to dismantle them and poke in to their business. Maintaining multifaceted relationships with them, having lots of different connections with lots of different departments, goes a long way to helping prevent that.
mikevm 5y ago
Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent. That's what you get when you hire SJWs. Funny how the current border fiasco under the Biden administration is not bothering any of these leftists.
PeterisP 5y ago
I don't know the details of this, but it does seem to make sense - it may be prohibited to fire an employee for requesting better working conditions, but if an employee refuses to serve a particular customer because they don't like them, that would seem to me a quite reasonable reason for termination. Labor law legitimately protects many parts of employee-employer relationships, but the employer's choice of which customers to serve is not one of them, as long as the service is otherwise legal to perform and does not put the employees at personal risk (e.g. from a specific customer that's abusive to your employees). How would/should a restaurant react if some waiters team up and argue to other waiters "we shouldn't serve those bloody [insert your favorite group] bastards in this restaurant, they're immoral and evil" ? Would/should their managers have the right to intervene and prevent that? IMHO such requests simply are not a legitimate demand that should be protected under labor law - for those aspects, the employer can set the policy and if you disagree with the employer's policy, you can quit or be fired even in countries/states where otherwise they can't fire you just because.
- thethirdone 5y ago
  > ... it may be prohibited to fire an employee for requesting better working conditions, but if an employee refuses to serve a particular customer because they don't like them, that would seem to me a quite reasonable reason for termination. I agree completely. However, if an employee doesn't refuse to serve a particular customer, but instead voices to management that they do not want to serve that customer, I don't think it should be ok to fire them. In this case, it seems to be less about declining to serve and more about voicing an opinion (showing a petition throughout the office).
  - chii 5y ago
    > voicing an opinion (showing a petition throughout the office) voicing an opinion with the intent to gather enough employee consensus to pressure the employer to not serve a particular customer. So the end result is the same - an employee was able to override the decision on who to serve made by management/shareholder. An employee voicing an opinion is not wrong - but if the reason for said opinion is not in the best interest of the employer, that would mean the employer won't want to heed it unless forced by law.

78 points by gorbachev 5y ago

Protest by leaving google. If everyone who is doing this protest left, would Google have that many staff to make up for the ones that left? This solution is incredibly flawed, I'm aware. But just a thought.

Goety 5y ago
>Google have that many staff to make up for the ones that left? Yes

vondur 5y ago

If enough of their quality engineers quit, they’d probably reconsider that policy.

tmpz22 5y ago
But my team is one of the good teams it’s the other teams that are bad! /s
randyrand 5y ago
That's exactly what they want - for these engineers to no longer work at Google. That's why they fired them. Quitting is probably preferred.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

aaomidi 5y ago

Google workers should seize the means of production and unionize.

azornathogron 5y ago
Do you mean, for example, by creating the Alphabet Workers Union? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Workers_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Workers_Union

ffggvv 5y ago

i’m just imagining boeing or raytheon employees protesting they don’t want to work with the government. what midwits

nix23 5y ago
Uhh, our Cruise missile flown the wrong way, i demand... ;)
WastingMyTime89 5y ago
I did quit a defence company because they started working with a government I didn't want to work for. These things happen. Then again, I find it strange to refuse working for your own government.
- ffggvv 5y ago
  quitting is the honorable thing to do. doing a "walk out" when youre working from home and no one knows if youre at your desk at not while continuing to collect a salary is just virtue signaling

aaron695 5y ago

This is a good example of Bullshit jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs) These type of employees are just the start of a lot of bad apples. A bit like a cancer, how do you fire (or not hire) just people like this? And you can't really blame Google, when they chose "Don't be evil" they didn't predict how evil social media (Twitter) would make people. And that's it, just because you know about Bullshit jobs there doesn't seem like a solution. Google needs to cull tens of thousands of employees, what more can they do than hope they quit. More likely the good ones will quit and go to agnostic companies because Google lets people like this stay.

inglor_cz 5y ago

It wouldn't surprise me if the employees in question were relatively fresh graduates. At the college, student petitions are taken much more seriously by administrations. But that has a lot in common with obscene tuition charged to the same students by the same administrations. People will generally be more open to demands from those who directly contribute money to their salaries. The dynamics at a place of employment is very different - especially in case of entities that so far have shown no difficulties in attracting replacement talent.

iamevn 5y ago
The four employees Alphabet fired near the end of 2019 were Laurence Berland (SRE, 11 years at Google), Paul Duke (SWE, 8 years at Google), Rebecca Rivers (SWE, 4 years at Google), and Sophie Waldman (SWE, just under 2 years at Google). Not sure how soon out of college any are or where else they've worked before Google but I don't think they're fresh grads.

YmiYugy 5y ago

So many companies including Google use "make the world a better place", or "make a difference" terminology in their recruitment. There are also a huge number of people that will chose a job over a higher paying one for the supposed purpose it provides. The choice of clients absolutely affects people's perception of their purpose and it is thus a completely ludicrous idea to me that Google's choice of clients doesn't affect workplace conditions.

sunstone 5y ago

In theory this is correct. In practice, when all your assets leave the building via the elevator every afternoon, it's not like running a gold mine. In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.

iamevn 5y ago

The idea that these people accessed highly confidential information is laughable. They looked at people's calendars and read docs that were set to be visible to everyone internally. They found that Alphabet was working with firms that do union busting things and tried to gather support to start a union. Alphabet retaliated against them swiftly and made efforts to smear their names internally. As part of the fallout from this, one small but important part of company culture was broken. It used to be that almost all docs were visible to all employees and exceptions were locked down with the access controls docs gives you. Any design docs, roadmaps, etc. you were curious about was very likely to be accessible. Maybe you were considering using a service for your stack and wanted more detail or context, maybe you are considering switching teams and want to see what they're up to, maybe you're just curious and want to learn about something new. Soon after these people were fired the default was swapped to things being very locked down and most people do not think to open it up to more than the reviewers/teammates that need access. (I'm also of the opinion that the notice that them NLRB required Alphabet post in-office was not sufficiently visible as all of the offices I've been in had them tucked away in places like the mail room but that's just me)

mikewarot 5y ago

So if Google decides to provide services to the firm of Orwell, Godwin, and Marx, to help correct certain ungood thought related to our conflict with EastAsia (who we have always been at war with!) the employees had better just sit down and shut up?

jaytaylor 5y ago

That isn't very Google-y of them! Where can we report the cultural violation? /me laughs Seriously though: > “What we have here is a protest that does not seek to improve employees’ terms and conditions of employment,” but rather “a purely political protest that sought to use Google’s government contracts, or potential government contracts, as leverage,” he said. > Google violated the law “to discourage employees from engaging in” legally-protected activism, according to a July complaint issued by labor board prosecutors. How hard will the Labor Board fight to protect employee political speech? It seems like a different level of concern compared to pursuing reasonable working conditions for workers.

perl4ever 5y ago
Where the hell does it say Google or any employer has the right to make up exclusions to the right to organize? Protecting employee interests is a basic right, and if the employer could define the set of valid interests, it would completely negate all protections. Quoting from the law that I believe this is based on: "RIGHTS OF EMPLOYEES Sec. 7. [§ 157.] Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection..." https://www.nlrb.gov/guidance/key-reference-materials/national-labor-relations-act https://www.nlrb.gov/guidance/key-reference-materials/nation...
- dekhn 5y ago
  Are you suggesting that, with the existence of these laws, Google is not allowed to prevent employees from spiking business deals? I don't think that's how that law works, although it's not well tested in this scenario. Unless the employees could articulate a specific harm, judicial system will not be sympathetic to them.
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    Google is not allowed to prevent employees from organizing with each other and from collectively bargaining with Google, regardless of whether that ends up preventing business deals. Making a business deal is not an excuse for breaking the law.

tomklein 5y ago

I think one of the major advantages a tech company can have against their competitors is their culture and recently, Google seems to be losing out on this a lot. IMHO there is a huge difference between companies that just have workers and companies that are a group of people working towards a common goal/vision

john_yaya 5y ago
What happens when that common goal is antithetical to the company’s ability to turn a profit?
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  It would be bad for the company. Do you think Google is at risk of not being able to turn a profit?
  - dekhn 5y ago
    If they forgo all the defense spending in the US and it goes to Azure and AWS instead, it will leave Google a perpetual third-runner. I'm generally of the opinion that Google (leadership) can select the customers they want to take on in cloud (such as defense), with whom they want to work on, so long as they're not breaking laws in the places the data is stored or processed. And googlers who don't like that should quit in protest rather than trying to muck things up on the inside. Does that mean that forgoing defense contracts mean Google won't profit? Probably not, but cloud services aren't just about profit.
  - austhrow743 5y ago
    I certainly do. Not based on losing the revenue generated directly by U.S. Customs and Border Protection contracts or any other government agency, but based on having icy/arms length relations with governments. It's very important to them that governments dont see them as a problem and start looking at all the different ways to dismantle them and poke in to their business. Maintaining multifaceted relationships with them, having lots of different connections with lots of different departments, goes a long way to helping prevent that.

mikevm 5y ago

Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent. That's what you get when you hire SJWs. Funny how the current border fiasco under the Biden administration is not bothering any of these leftists.

PeterisP 5y ago

I don't know the details of this, but it does seem to make sense - it may be prohibited to fire an employee for requesting better working conditions, but if an employee refuses to serve a particular customer because they don't like them, that would seem to me a quite reasonable reason for termination. Labor law legitimately protects many parts of employee-employer relationships, but the employer's choice of which customers to serve is not one of them, as long as the service is otherwise legal to perform and does not put the employees at personal risk (e.g. from a specific customer that's abusive to your employees). How would/should a restaurant react if some waiters team up and argue to other waiters "we shouldn't serve those bloody [insert your favorite group] bastards in this restaurant, they're immoral and evil" ? Would/should their managers have the right to intervene and prevent that? IMHO such requests simply are not a legitimate demand that should be protected under labor law - for those aspects, the employer can set the policy and if you disagree with the employer's policy, you can quit or be fired even in countries/states where otherwise they can't fire you just because.

thethirdone 5y ago
> ... it may be prohibited to fire an employee for requesting better working conditions, but if an employee refuses to serve a particular customer because they don't like them, that would seem to me a quite reasonable reason for termination. I agree completely. However, if an employee doesn't refuse to serve a particular customer, but instead voices to management that they do not want to serve that customer, I don't think it should be ok to fire them. In this case, it seems to be less about declining to serve and more about voicing an opinion (showing a petition throughout the office).
- chii 5y ago
  > voicing an opinion (showing a petition throughout the office) voicing an opinion with the intent to gather enough employee consensus to pressure the employer to not serve a particular customer. So the end result is the same - an employee was able to override the decision on who to serve made by management/shareholder. An employee voicing an opinion is not wrong - but if the reason for said opinion is not in the best interest of the employer, that would mean the employer won't want to heed it unless forced by law.