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Google nixes paying out rest of medical leave for laid-off employees

98 points by czhiddy 4y ago

m348e912 4y ago
Why should Google pay maternity leave for laid off workers? They are no longer employees once they're laid off. At the very most they deserve a severence.
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  Cynically, because the cost of paying out what they promised these workers is less than the goodwill they'll lose. Optimistically, because it's the right thing to do.
- AraceliHarker 4y ago
  The blame of the recent layoffs lay not with the employees but with the managers who had miscalculated their prospects in the midst of the covidic plague.
  - throwaway45501 4y ago
    Why is it the company's responsibility to keep employees that are no longer necessary? I don't understand that. Did Google or any other company promised these people that they will be hired forever? Google hired them and paid them very cushy salaries. What am I missing? I really don't understand the discussion around those recent layoffs.
    - foepys 4y ago
      And people wonder why birth rates are falling and people are afraid to make long term commitments. Corporations like this don't deserve any loyalty. If I worked there and anybody offered to pay me even a few percent more, I'd leave in a heartbeat. I probably wouldn't even work hard, only the bare minimum to not get fired, because why should I? In conservative media this this is being spun as "nobody wants to work anymore because millennials and gen Z are lazy" but the real reason is very obvious for anybody under 30: as a corporate employee hard work doesn't pay off most of the time, instead you will be fired when shareholders are in danger of losing a few dollars.
      - throwaway45501 4y ago
        Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? As employee I enter into mutually beneficial (and in case of IT and FAANG - extremely beneficial) contract knowing that I can be fired once the company deems my services no longer necessary. The backlash comes from highest educated, best skilled people who received high salaries and who have great prospects of being hired again quickly. Why they suffer? Should these companies not hire those employees in the first place? The employees would be jobless then, our would be hired by companies witch they previously rejected in favor of FAANG. To me it all seems like reality check for people who for years were bit out of touch with, well, reality. This is what regular people deal with all the time. Regarding your argument about falling birth rates - education, career, job stability etc. are all negatively correlated with birth rates. I'm pretty sure that FAANG employees have one of the lowest birth rates in society - I admit, I have no data to back this up.
        lenkite 4y ago
        > Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? What an utterly stupid analogy. You never hired the Plumber as an Employee in the first place. They layed off female employees on maternity leave just as they gave birth to children. No payout for the remainder of their maternity leave. That also contradicts your assertion of whether FAANG employees were making children btw. Google was horrendously cruel here.
        rightbyte 4y ago
        > Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? The analogy is flawed. You pay him until he completes his job. Or he will be pissed. Google is telling the plumber to leave before the agreed upon work is done.
        Kiro 4y ago
        The plumber analogy is flawed but yours is not much better. When is the agreed work done for an employee? Employees are not hired to complete a specific job like a plumber is.
        4y ago
    - rektide 4y ago
      A company has a basic obligation to only do what makes sense, not what is superfluous. Mis-hiring a ton of people to only let lots of people go shows a untrustworthy dishonest shallow character. Maybe in some cases companies honestly fuck up, but most of the time it just looks like the idiotic cancer of growth at all costs attitude, a delusional nature. The infinite quintupling down that seems to be the one & only move business-types so often seem to have, a pattern of relentless self-promotion in all conditions. The genuineness of a company that can tap a wider base, to make calibrated decisions upon, is rare. And instances like this just show how much disdain there is from the top to everyone below. Utter disrespect, no acknowledgement that the org was being false, no try to do right., just letting trust in the org fail.
      - throwaway45501 4y ago
        Business is not your friend, it's not your family. The only goal of business is to make profit. If they can make something good along the way - great, but don't expect them to do it. At this scale it seems very hard to make good decisions. It looks like a lot of companies overestimated their long term needs. Also, they might have hired those employees to prevent competition from hiring them,and it might have been a good business decision. What people fail to understand is that corporations goal is not to maximize well-being of their employees. I wonder if this is a result of liberal movement that allowed those companies to leech to various causes (LGBTQ rights,gender equality, etc) and allowed them to spread image of friendly, responsible, good, family-like image. I 100% support those movements myself, but I also have seen this coming for years. As soon as it no longer pays off to be friendly, corporations stop be such. The best way to fight this is to educate people that corporations are not your friend, family, they don't care much about you.
        rektide 4y ago
        If businesses did try to align to & respect their workforces these dont-trust-anyone sentiments wouldn't be necessary. And I contend, the business would likely behave much smarter, make less f-ups, make better products and decisions. Accepting merely a fait-accompli that there is misalignment & operating in negative prisoners-dilemna non-cooperative modes forever is just a shit play. Both sides need to show up & power-share to actually make anything work.
  - JamesBarney 4y ago
    It's more than just Covid. When interest rates are 0 it makes sense to spend a lot on R&D that will pay off in 10 years. When interest rates are 7% suddenly that might not make as much sense. It's true Google management didn't foresee this issue but it's not like Google was an outlier. Everyone in the economy thought the same thing.
- whitemary 4y ago
  They deserve the whole of the product of their labor.
- MagicMoonlight 4y ago
  This is your brain on america
- foepys 4y ago
  This is one of the reasons why maternity leave compensation is paid by the government in Germany. But to American ears that's socialism or something, I guess.
- hansvm 4y ago
  - Laying off somebody on maternity leave and then not paying them for that leave is exactly what you would expect from a company laying somebody off _because_ they're on maternity leave, which would be strikingly illegal (IMO not immoral per se -- that burden should be averaged across all of society rather than localized to each employer -- definitely illegal though). At a minimum they'd want their ducks in a row to ensure those layoffs were legitimate. - Promising a person a particular thing (approving maternity leave, for example) goes above and beyond the ordinary employment contract, and cutting the duration of that promise short doesn't sit well. - Google offers (offered?) a variety of specialized healthcare plans that you can choose _instead of_ a standard PPO or whatever, and those require you to move to doctors in a very small network. Cutting off those services and saying "LOL, have fun with finding new doctors on top of figuring out Cobra" with less than a day of warning is a bigger inconvenience than you'd expect from comparable layoffs elsewhere.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Isn’t the entire point of Cobra that you can keep your previous healthcare plan?
    - hansvm 4y ago
      Yep. That didn't stop Google from denying that coverage to the people laid off in the article though, and the fact that it's some sort of custom/in-house thing means they probably have the power to cause that sort of disruption regardless of any eventual legal outcomes.
- alanfranz 4y ago
  Because while you are on a medical leave or a maternity leave it’s especially difficult for you to sort out things, or to find another job? “I laid you off while you’re lactating, please find another job in 60 days or leave US”. In most places in EU it would be illegal to layoff people in those situations, that’s not a US thing of course, but just asking the already-approved deal to be honored seems just obvious.
  - JamesBarney 4y ago
    Aren't they getting 16 weeks of severance + 2 weeks per year. Say an average of 2 years of work. Most people at Google are making at least 150k. That's almost 60k. That's more than the median U.S. worker makes in a year. And more than the median household income in almost every EU country. Not to mention no one Google lays off is going to have any trouble finding a job paying at least the median wage.
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      Most Google employees do not have median expenses or a clear path to getting there without drastically upending their lives.
    - alanfranz 4y ago
      > Not to mention no one Google lays off is going to have any trouble finding a job paying at least the median wage. While feeding a newborn or dealing with serious illness? That’s the point. You’re on a leave for a reason. You don’t expect the leave to be unilaterally canceled. Not to mention that, if you’re an immigrant, you have visa problems as well.
  - winrid 4y ago
    It's even illegal in China...
- temp20160423 4y ago
  G attracted workers by offering this baby bonding leave and increased it recently from 12 weeks to 18 weeks. Even amazon is letting people on leave finish it before their severance starts according to the article. This whole layoff round at G looks extremely rushed and someone probably didn't think through all the edge cases, such as people already on leave. For 20 years, G's main advantage was top of market perks and culture (comp was good, but not the top). These layoff rounds have permanently hurt Google's reputation IMO. When the tech hiring market gets competitive again, they will either have to raise comp significantly once everyone realizes the culture has changed or they won't be competitive to attract the top talent.
  - schoolornot 4y ago
    I see a recurring pattern of chief people officers and their minions totally destroying company brands and internal morale. This isn't traditional HR nonsense but pure Peter Principle. It really must be too much run plans and messaging through a comms or marketing team first. As a manager, this stuff pisses me off to no end because it seeds worry in the minds of team members that are in no way at risk.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Yep. I know so many people that joined google from other places because of the culture and perks. I certainly chose not to leave because of those things. That calculus is clearly changing.
- wesleywt 4y ago
  Yes, if the worker was on maternity leave when laid off. What I have noticed about American culture, despite having money they are extreme penny pitches in the oddest of places.
  - m348e912 4y ago
    I am the parent of this thread and been heavily downvoted for my initial comment. I agree with you. If the worker was already on maternity leave they should get stay on maternity leave for the duration of the leave regardless of layoffs. What I was referring to an employee that had been already laid off by google, and at some point after needs to go on maternity leave. I'm not sure google should be obligated to support maternity leave in that case as the employee is no longer subject to company benefits (with the exception of access to COBRA/health insurance)
- camillomiller 4y ago
  This comment is probably the best explanation of how American capitalism is effective at self-propagate its tenets through the confidence of those it screws over the most.
- black_puppydog 4y ago
  because people plan their family around things like maternity leave and rely on these actually being honored. what should they do now, get un-pregnant?
DanHulton 4y ago
"Don't be evil."
- kenjackson 4y ago
  Google has done a lot of less than good things recently. This is honestly probably the first thing I’d classify as evil with no nuance. The only possible way I’d think this is justified is if Google would have to file bankruptcy if they didn’t do this.
  - bozhark 4y ago
    Why do you think Brin and Page put Sundar Pichai as front man of Google _with an additional layer of discrepancy_; Alphabet.
Takennickname 4y ago
[flagged]
- davesque 4y ago
  All I have to say is...wow.
- lpapez 4y ago
  This is your brain on America kids.
- dumpster_fire 4y ago
  [dead]
- saagarjha 4y ago
  I am a Google shareholder and an American. I would love if my country provided this kind of care, but it doesn't, and Google's public image profits from being able to step in when our government does not. Obviously, it because difficult for that image to perpetuate itself if it does things like this, so I wish for it to not do that.
Manheim 4y ago
In Scandinavia this is regulated by law. Being on leave does not protect against dismissal in Norway. But the Working Environment Act states that the notice period does not start to run until the leave period has expired. And, the fact that you are on leave cannot in itself be used by the employer as a reason for dismissal. So, if Google had laid off a worker in Norway who was on leave, they wouldn't have much choice but to stand by their obligations.
- WirelessGigabit 4y ago
  Not only that. I'm assuming that in Norway you have a notice period which is tied to how long you work there. Not the case here. I could sign a mortgage Monday and be laid off Tuesday. So then my income and insurance just stop. Companies have no obligation to give you notice. Anything they do is literally out of the good of their PR people. Some states require payout of accrued vacation days (notice the government doesn't mandate any amount of vacation days, it's all up to negotiation). Then you can go on unemployment, but for some reason it's capped in amount per month, so even if I make $200,000/year, which after taxes becomes $11,000/month. I live in a HCOL, my unemployment would be ~$450/week, so ~ $2,000/month. Which is less than my rent. And I pay A LOT of taxes.
  - Manheim 4y ago
    Sounds like things are broken. We have a minimum notice period of three months in Norway, and many have a contract that give them more than that. This is a mutual obligation, so if you want to quit your job for a new one, you will have to stay in your current for the notice period. How much unemployment support you get depends on your salary level, and it has an upper cap, but it should be sufficient enough to keep you floating while you seek for a new job. It is not a sleeping pillow, though. You do not get a full compensation. You get the support until you get a new job or for 12 months. If you are still without a job after 12 months you can apply for another 12 months period. If you are not able to get a new job within this period you will have to rely on other types of public support if you are entitled to any of them. You might think that this would lead to people not wanting to get a new job immediately. However, the unemployment rate is currently at 3,4 percent.
AllegedAlec 4y ago
[flagged]
- procinct 4y ago
  What? Fathers are also birth parents. As opposed to step parents or adoptive parents. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/birth%20parent https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/birth%20parent
  - MrOwnPut 4y ago
    Biological parents already described that.
    - procinct 4y ago
      Yes, they are generally synonyms. It’s not a new term.
      - MrOwnPut 4y ago
        As another user pointed out, why does the definition you posted qualify it with: "who has been adopted" > It's not a new term I see, it's somewhat new to me, when did the term come to popular usage? When was it "invented"?
        dragonwriter 4y ago
        > when did the term come to popular usage? When was it “invented”? Its always been somewhat less popular than “biological parents”, but its been in wide use since somewhere about the late 1970s, and it (or at least, the narrower form “birth mother”) was in use by the early 1950s at the latest.
        procinct 4y ago
        The reason why it’s qualified by people who are adopted is because people who aren’t would just refer to them as “parents” not “birth parents” since there is no need to make a distinction. People who are adopted have two sets of parents so it’s used to distinguish who they are referring to.
pfoof 4y ago
So, can someone clarify: if a laid off Googler is in hospital bed and they stay there after the deadline, they might go into debt (due to hospital prices)?
- dumpster_fire 4y ago
  [dead]
- sacnoradhq 4y ago
  Not just might go into debt, they might go bankrupt. In America, illness, including terminal illness, are a leading cause of bankruptcy. America is a win-lose rat race scam where the rats are too docile.
- lurking_swe 4y ago
  realistically the googler will have the option to continue their health coverage (at the FULL price) using what we call COBRA. So no, they won’t go bankrupt unless they are in the hospital for many months. But it would still be stressful because COBRA doesn’t last forever, and they will want to eventually get another job. good employers like google pay for most of the insurance cost each month, and the employee pays a small “premium” that is deducted from each paycheck.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  No. Here are the options: 1. Google is continuing to pay full health care for 6 months, for all laid off employees, as part of their severance. 2. In addition, in the US, workers at decent-sized companies have the option to get COBRA for up to 18 months. COBRA basically says you can stay on your employer's group health plan, but you have to pay the full premiums out of pocket (usually companies pay most or all of the premium). This can be particularly expensive for a family (e.g. $1500 a month or so). 3. After that, if you haven't gotten another job that offers insurance, you can get an individual plan through Obamacare. Again, the cost of these plans can be expensive depending on your circumstances and level of coverage.
  - xracy 4y ago
dumpster_fire 4y ago
[dead]
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
That's one of key differences between Europe and the USA. What a big company advertises as a big privilege (that you can lose at their whim) is just one of basic human rights here.
sacnoradhq 4y ago
Google is a shitty company, TBH. They laid off senior GCP techs because they didn't want to promote them.
redleggedfrog 4y ago
"It's just a tiny tiny change. We just dropped the "Don't ". The shorter phrase better reflects our new streamlined business practices to better suck shareholder d*ck."
- ta1243 4y ago
  The motto is now Don't! Be Evil
  - djbusby 4y ago
    Works on contingency? No! Money down!
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
Can someone argue convincingly that this is ethical?
- falcolas 4y ago
  “The most ethical action a company can take is to maximize the shareholder’s value, no matter the long term cost.” /s (for me at least)
- junofan 4y ago
  If these people want severance on top of maternity leave, it’s not really fair to the other people laid off.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    I’m not sure how you can conclude that, unless you’re just saying that parental and medical leave is inherently unfair. If that’s your position, feel free to argue it separately (strong “only in America” vibes, but whatever). The issue here is simply whether Google should honor the commitments Google already made. If Google approved your leave, I’d say you’re entitled to it, no different than if you had accrued paid vacation time per Google’s vacation rules.
  - haswell 4y ago
    Howso? Medical leave wad available to all employees, including those who were laid off. Especially with modern family planning, it is possible to be strategic about when to use such leave, and natural to include the expectation of continued employment upon return into the decision to use such leave. I’m not claiming there’s a simple answer - I understand the point that it seems unfair that an employee on leave will “get more” than an employee who wasn’t, but at the same time, this is the commitment that Google made, and I can’t shake the feeling that a mother giving birth and then using the resulting benefit that she was promised should be entirely unrelated to any notions of severance. If anything, it makes it look like Google is taking advantage of people on leave, not somehow leveling the playing field.
- jmclnx 4y ago
djbusby 4y ago
FTA: Google has decided to not honor pre-approved leave Basically, going back on your word. No honour.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
endisneigh 4y ago
Isn’t the whole point of severance compensation for terminating your employment and other prior agreements, given that you are not at fault? It doesn’t really make sense for one to demand both severance and their leave. From my understanding the Google severance effectively pays you more than maternity leave anyways unless you were at Google for less than 3 years. I wonder how many are in that situation. One example in the article involved a person who had been at Google for 10 years. They would receive 36 weeks severance. More than the 24 weeks they would receive as maternity leave. It seems that person is arguing they should receive 60 weeks severance.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  Most of the folks laid off aren't on any sort of maternity leave. Of the tiny fraction on maternity leave few logically will have just gone on leave the day they get laid of. Statistically if you pick a random time in a 24 week period the average remaining duration is 12 weeks. Its also meaningless to add the severance that google already agreed to pay and maternity together to decide if the total is reasonable, even more so when you are picking the edge case on an edge case of a long term worker laid off right after going on leave. It's not even clear more than one person in the whole cadre actually meets those criteria. We are talking about presumably a fraction of 1% of laid off workers receiving an average of 12 additional weeks of pay which for google is a rounding error. Most wont be receiving this benefit and of those that will the majority will have closer to 30 than 60 weeks of pay total.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
OK, I'll take a stab at defending Google's policy here. Not necessarily because I believe they're 100% in the right, but because I see so many of the arguments on the other side completely failing to address some issues of fairness, and of leaning solely into the emotional aspects of this issue ("Person <in heart-tugging situation X> was laid off!"), or just spitting out lazy comebacks ("Google is evil now!!!") I don't really see this as "Google won't honor medical leave" any more than I see this as "Google won't honor employment agreement". That is, people on medical leave get paid while they're not working but still employed (and, mind you, this is not something that's a legal requirement, but something Google does with their largess - the vast majority of companies, in the US at least, without monopolistic businesses are way less generous), and I'm not sure why being on medical leave should automatically put you in the "you can't be laid off until your leave is over" bucket. After all, tons of people who were laid off who were not on leave had plenty of important reasons they shouldn't be laid off (e.g. I'm sure lots of people had spouses or dependents on Google's health plan who were wholly dependent on it). I just see some fundamental fairness issues that aren't even commented on by people insisting Google is evil. More importantly, the root cause issue (in the US) is that so many critical benefits are linked to employment. I know that other countries have stricter laws around this (e.g. you can't be laid off on maternity leave), but that's kinda the point - with a broad legal framework of what's required, and especially with many benefits being ensured by the state (especially healthcare), it means that the individuals are not dependent on the generosity (and huge profit margins) of their particular company. I mean, the FAANGs especially like to talk about how generous they are with things like unusually long parental leave (again, relatively in the US), but that's only because they make so much money. There is a reason that restaurants, for example, could never begin to offer this level of leave, and it's not because restaurant owners are inherently more cruel. If we believe the benefits are important for societal function and fairness, we should pay for them at the societal level, instead of depending on the whims of individual employers to guarantee them.
- protastus 4y ago
  Yes, the root cause is that the U.S. barely has any labor laws, and this puts people in cruel situations that are inconsistent with the level of economic development achieved by this nation. Many knowledge workers expect stronger guarantees for earned benefits, out of an intuitive sense of ethics and commitment, but those expectations are more in line with labor laws found in European countries. In the U.S., workers often have no recourse or leverage against even small companies, let alone Google. "Earned" benefits evaporate once the employment contract is void.
siliconc0w 4y ago
The 'big tech' calculus to suddenly antagonize their workforce to eek out marginal 'efficiency' gains is going to backfire. People may not leave right away but a demoralized fearful workforce isn't going to innovate, or really even give a shit about the work. Teams basically haven't done anything for three months because all the work needs to be reprioritized and that can't even be done when teams still don't know who is walking dead and who isn't.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  Ïs this a "big tech" issue or a "USA employment laws" issue? Dosent all comapnies do this in america?
belter 4y ago
This is the kind of petty behavior that shows there is no leadership at the helm. The CEO should be fired, not because of these specific actions, that are likely to be legal according to the US almost non existing labor laws. Instead, because of the lack of management skills and smart company leadership expected from company executives handsomely paid. As a leader, manager or CEO, you choose your wars, and your battles. This shows incompetent execution at the minimum and at worst, a hands off type of leadership only seen in the times of WeWork. Shareholders, take notice.

98 points by czhiddy 4y ago

Why should Google pay maternity leave for laid off workers? They are no longer employees once they're laid off. At the very most they deserve a severence.

aaronbrethorst 4y ago
Cynically, because the cost of paying out what they promised these workers is less than the goodwill they'll lose. Optimistically, because it's the right thing to do.
AraceliHarker 4y ago
The blame of the recent layoffs lay not with the employees but with the managers who had miscalculated their prospects in the midst of the covidic plague.
- throwaway45501 4y ago
  Why is it the company's responsibility to keep employees that are no longer necessary? I don't understand that. Did Google or any other company promised these people that they will be hired forever? Google hired them and paid them very cushy salaries. What am I missing? I really don't understand the discussion around those recent layoffs.
  - foepys 4y ago
    And people wonder why birth rates are falling and people are afraid to make long term commitments. Corporations like this don't deserve any loyalty. If I worked there and anybody offered to pay me even a few percent more, I'd leave in a heartbeat. I probably wouldn't even work hard, only the bare minimum to not get fired, because why should I? In conservative media this this is being spun as "nobody wants to work anymore because millennials and gen Z are lazy" but the real reason is very obvious for anybody under 30: as a corporate employee hard work doesn't pay off most of the time, instead you will be fired when shareholders are in danger of losing a few dollars.
    - throwaway45501 4y ago
      Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? As employee I enter into mutually beneficial (and in case of IT and FAANG - extremely beneficial) contract knowing that I can be fired once the company deems my services no longer necessary. The backlash comes from highest educated, best skilled people who received high salaries and who have great prospects of being hired again quickly. Why they suffer? Should these companies not hire those employees in the first place? The employees would be jobless then, our would be hired by companies witch they previously rejected in favor of FAANG. To me it all seems like reality check for people who for years were bit out of touch with, well, reality. This is what regular people deal with all the time. Regarding your argument about falling birth rates - education, career, job stability etc. are all negatively correlated with birth rates. I'm pretty sure that FAANG employees have one of the lowest birth rates in society - I admit, I have no data to back this up.
      - lenkite 4y ago
        > Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? What an utterly stupid analogy. You never hired the Plumber as an Employee in the first place. They layed off female employees on maternity leave just as they gave birth to children. No payout for the remainder of their maternity leave. That also contradicts your assertion of whether FAANG employees were making children btw. Google was horrendously cruel here.
      - rightbyte 4y ago
        > Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? The analogy is flawed. You pay him until he completes his job. Or he will be pissed. Google is telling the plumber to leave before the agreed upon work is done.
        Kiro 4y ago
        The plumber analogy is flawed but yours is not much better. When is the agreed work done for an employee? Employees are not hired to complete a specific job like a plumber is.
      - 4y ago
  - rektide 4y ago
    A company has a basic obligation to only do what makes sense, not what is superfluous. Mis-hiring a ton of people to only let lots of people go shows a untrustworthy dishonest shallow character. Maybe in some cases companies honestly fuck up, but most of the time it just looks like the idiotic cancer of growth at all costs attitude, a delusional nature. The infinite quintupling down that seems to be the one & only move business-types so often seem to have, a pattern of relentless self-promotion in all conditions. The genuineness of a company that can tap a wider base, to make calibrated decisions upon, is rare. And instances like this just show how much disdain there is from the top to everyone below. Utter disrespect, no acknowledgement that the org was being false, no try to do right., just letting trust in the org fail.
    - throwaway45501 4y ago
      Business is not your friend, it's not your family. The only goal of business is to make profit. If they can make something good along the way - great, but don't expect them to do it. At this scale it seems very hard to make good decisions. It looks like a lot of companies overestimated their long term needs. Also, they might have hired those employees to prevent competition from hiring them,and it might have been a good business decision. What people fail to understand is that corporations goal is not to maximize well-being of their employees. I wonder if this is a result of liberal movement that allowed those companies to leech to various causes (LGBTQ rights,gender equality, etc) and allowed them to spread image of friendly, responsible, good, family-like image. I 100% support those movements myself, but I also have seen this coming for years. As soon as it no longer pays off to be friendly, corporations stop be such. The best way to fight this is to educate people that corporations are not your friend, family, they don't care much about you.
      - rektide 4y ago
        If businesses did try to align to & respect their workforces these dont-trust-anyone sentiments wouldn't be necessary. And I contend, the business would likely behave much smarter, make less f-ups, make better products and decisions. Accepting merely a fait-accompli that there is misalignment & operating in negative prisoners-dilemna non-cooperative modes forever is just a shit play. Both sides need to show up & power-share to actually make anything work.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  It's more than just Covid. When interest rates are 0 it makes sense to spend a lot on R&D that will pay off in 10 years. When interest rates are 7% suddenly that might not make as much sense. It's true Google management didn't foresee this issue but it's not like Google was an outlier. Everyone in the economy thought the same thing.
whitemary 4y ago
They deserve the whole of the product of their labor.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
This is your brain on america
foepys 4y ago
This is one of the reasons why maternity leave compensation is paid by the government in Germany. But to American ears that's socialism or something, I guess.
hansvm 4y ago
- Laying off somebody on maternity leave and then not paying them for that leave is exactly what you would expect from a company laying somebody off _because_ they're on maternity leave, which would be strikingly illegal (IMO not immoral per se -- that burden should be averaged across all of society rather than localized to each employer -- definitely illegal though). At a minimum they'd want their ducks in a row to ensure those layoffs were legitimate. - Promising a person a particular thing (approving maternity leave, for example) goes above and beyond the ordinary employment contract, and cutting the duration of that promise short doesn't sit well. - Google offers (offered?) a variety of specialized healthcare plans that you can choose _instead of_ a standard PPO or whatever, and those require you to move to doctors in a very small network. Cutting off those services and saying "LOL, have fun with finding new doctors on top of figuring out Cobra" with less than a day of warning is a bigger inconvenience than you'd expect from comparable layoffs elsewhere.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Isn’t the entire point of Cobra that you can keep your previous healthcare plan?
  - hansvm 4y ago
    Yep. That didn't stop Google from denying that coverage to the people laid off in the article though, and the fact that it's some sort of custom/in-house thing means they probably have the power to cause that sort of disruption regardless of any eventual legal outcomes.
alanfranz 4y ago
Because while you are on a medical leave or a maternity leave it’s especially difficult for you to sort out things, or to find another job? “I laid you off while you’re lactating, please find another job in 60 days or leave US”. In most places in EU it would be illegal to layoff people in those situations, that’s not a US thing of course, but just asking the already-approved deal to be honored seems just obvious.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  Aren't they getting 16 weeks of severance + 2 weeks per year. Say an average of 2 years of work. Most people at Google are making at least 150k. That's almost 60k. That's more than the median U.S. worker makes in a year. And more than the median household income in almost every EU country. Not to mention no one Google lays off is going to have any trouble finding a job paying at least the median wage.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    Most Google employees do not have median expenses or a clear path to getting there without drastically upending their lives.
  - alanfranz 4y ago
    > Not to mention no one Google lays off is going to have any trouble finding a job paying at least the median wage. While feeding a newborn or dealing with serious illness? That’s the point. You’re on a leave for a reason. You don’t expect the leave to be unilaterally canceled. Not to mention that, if you’re an immigrant, you have visa problems as well.
- winrid 4y ago
  It's even illegal in China...
temp20160423 4y ago
G attracted workers by offering this baby bonding leave and increased it recently from 12 weeks to 18 weeks. Even amazon is letting people on leave finish it before their severance starts according to the article. This whole layoff round at G looks extremely rushed and someone probably didn't think through all the edge cases, such as people already on leave. For 20 years, G's main advantage was top of market perks and culture (comp was good, but not the top). These layoff rounds have permanently hurt Google's reputation IMO. When the tech hiring market gets competitive again, they will either have to raise comp significantly once everyone realizes the culture has changed or they won't be competitive to attract the top talent.
- schoolornot 4y ago
  I see a recurring pattern of chief people officers and their minions totally destroying company brands and internal morale. This isn't traditional HR nonsense but pure Peter Principle. It really must be too much run plans and messaging through a comms or marketing team first. As a manager, this stuff pisses me off to no end because it seeds worry in the minds of team members that are in no way at risk.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Yep. I know so many people that joined google from other places because of the culture and perks. I certainly chose not to leave because of those things. That calculus is clearly changing.
wesleywt 4y ago
Yes, if the worker was on maternity leave when laid off. What I have noticed about American culture, despite having money they are extreme penny pitches in the oddest of places.
- m348e912 4y ago
  I am the parent of this thread and been heavily downvoted for my initial comment. I agree with you. If the worker was already on maternity leave they should get stay on maternity leave for the duration of the leave regardless of layoffs. What I was referring to an employee that had been already laid off by google, and at some point after needs to go on maternity leave. I'm not sure google should be obligated to support maternity leave in that case as the employee is no longer subject to company benefits (with the exception of access to COBRA/health insurance)
camillomiller 4y ago
This comment is probably the best explanation of how American capitalism is effective at self-propagate its tenets through the confidence of those it screws over the most.
black_puppydog 4y ago
because people plan their family around things like maternity leave and rely on these actually being honored. what should they do now, get un-pregnant?

DanHulton 4y ago

"Don't be evil."

kenjackson 4y ago
Google has done a lot of less than good things recently. This is honestly probably the first thing I’d classify as evil with no nuance. The only possible way I’d think this is justified is if Google would have to file bankruptcy if they didn’t do this.
- bozhark 4y ago
  Why do you think Brin and Page put Sundar Pichai as front man of Google _with an additional layer of discrepancy_; Alphabet.

Takennickname 4y ago

[flagged]

davesque 4y ago
All I have to say is...wow.
lpapez 4y ago
This is your brain on America kids.
dumpster_fire 4y ago
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saagarjha 4y ago
I am a Google shareholder and an American. I would love if my country provided this kind of care, but it doesn't, and Google's public image profits from being able to step in when our government does not. Obviously, it because difficult for that image to perpetuate itself if it does things like this, so I wish for it to not do that.

Manheim 4y ago

In Scandinavia this is regulated by law. Being on leave does not protect against dismissal in Norway. But the Working Environment Act states that the notice period does not start to run until the leave period has expired. And, the fact that you are on leave cannot in itself be used by the employer as a reason for dismissal. So, if Google had laid off a worker in Norway who was on leave, they wouldn't have much choice but to stand by their obligations.

WirelessGigabit 4y ago
Not only that. I'm assuming that in Norway you have a notice period which is tied to how long you work there. Not the case here. I could sign a mortgage Monday and be laid off Tuesday. So then my income and insurance just stop. Companies have no obligation to give you notice. Anything they do is literally out of the good of their PR people. Some states require payout of accrued vacation days (notice the government doesn't mandate any amount of vacation days, it's all up to negotiation). Then you can go on unemployment, but for some reason it's capped in amount per month, so even if I make $200,000/year, which after taxes becomes $11,000/month. I live in a HCOL, my unemployment would be ~$450/week, so ~ $2,000/month. Which is less than my rent. And I pay A LOT of taxes.
- Manheim 4y ago
  Sounds like things are broken. We have a minimum notice period of three months in Norway, and many have a contract that give them more than that. This is a mutual obligation, so if you want to quit your job for a new one, you will have to stay in your current for the notice period. How much unemployment support you get depends on your salary level, and it has an upper cap, but it should be sufficient enough to keep you floating while you seek for a new job. It is not a sleeping pillow, though. You do not get a full compensation. You get the support until you get a new job or for 12 months. If you are still without a job after 12 months you can apply for another 12 months period. If you are not able to get a new job within this period you will have to rely on other types of public support if you are entitled to any of them. You might think that this would lead to people not wanting to get a new job immediately. However, the unemployment rate is currently at 3,4 percent.

AllegedAlec 4y ago

[flagged]

procinct 4y ago
What? Fathers are also birth parents. As opposed to step parents or adoptive parents. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/birth%20parent https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/birth%20parent
- MrOwnPut 4y ago
  Biological parents already described that.
  - procinct 4y ago
    Yes, they are generally synonyms. It’s not a new term.
    - MrOwnPut 4y ago
      As another user pointed out, why does the definition you posted qualify it with: "who has been adopted" > It's not a new term I see, it's somewhat new to me, when did the term come to popular usage? When was it "invented"?
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > when did the term come to popular usage? When was it “invented”? Its always been somewhat less popular than “biological parents”, but its been in wide use since somewhere about the late 1970s, and it (or at least, the narrower form “birth mother”) was in use by the early 1950s at the latest.
      - procinct 4y ago
        The reason why it’s qualified by people who are adopted is because people who aren’t would just refer to them as “parents” not “birth parents” since there is no need to make a distinction. People who are adopted have two sets of parents so it’s used to distinguish who they are referring to.

pfoof 4y ago

So, can someone clarify: if a laid off Googler is in hospital bed and they stay there after the deadline, they might go into debt (due to hospital prices)?

dumpster_fire 4y ago
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sacnoradhq 4y ago
Not just might go into debt, they might go bankrupt. In America, illness, including terminal illness, are a leading cause of bankruptcy. America is a win-lose rat race scam where the rats are too docile.
lurking_swe 4y ago
realistically the googler will have the option to continue their health coverage (at the FULL price) using what we call COBRA. So no, they won’t go bankrupt unless they are in the hospital for many months. But it would still be stressful because COBRA doesn’t last forever, and they will want to eventually get another job. good employers like google pay for most of the insurance cost each month, and the employee pays a small “premium” that is deducted from each paycheck.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
No. Here are the options: 1. Google is continuing to pay full health care for 6 months, for all laid off employees, as part of their severance. 2. In addition, in the US, workers at decent-sized companies have the option to get COBRA for up to 18 months. COBRA basically says you can stay on your employer's group health plan, but you have to pay the full premiums out of pocket (usually companies pay most or all of the premium). This can be particularly expensive for a family (e.g. $1500 a month or so). 3. After that, if you haven't gotten another job that offers insurance, you can get an individual plan through Obamacare. Again, the cost of these plans can be expensive depending on your circumstances and level of coverage.
- xracy 4y ago

dumpster_fire 4y ago

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hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

That's one of key differences between Europe and the USA. What a big company advertises as a big privilege (that you can lose at their whim) is just one of basic human rights here.

sacnoradhq 4y ago

Google is a shitty company, TBH. They laid off senior GCP techs because they didn't want to promote them.

redleggedfrog 4y ago

"It's just a tiny tiny change. We just dropped the "Don't ". The shorter phrase better reflects our new streamlined business practices to better suck shareholder d*ck."

ta1243 4y ago
The motto is now Don't! Be Evil
- djbusby 4y ago
  Works on contingency? No! Money down!

AndrewKemendo 4y ago

Can someone argue convincingly that this is ethical?

falcolas 4y ago
“The most ethical action a company can take is to maximize the shareholder’s value, no matter the long term cost.” /s (for me at least)
junofan 4y ago
If these people want severance on top of maternity leave, it’s not really fair to the other people laid off.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  I’m not sure how you can conclude that, unless you’re just saying that parental and medical leave is inherently unfair. If that’s your position, feel free to argue it separately (strong “only in America” vibes, but whatever). The issue here is simply whether Google should honor the commitments Google already made. If Google approved your leave, I’d say you’re entitled to it, no different than if you had accrued paid vacation time per Google’s vacation rules.
- haswell 4y ago
  Howso? Medical leave wad available to all employees, including those who were laid off. Especially with modern family planning, it is possible to be strategic about when to use such leave, and natural to include the expectation of continued employment upon return into the decision to use such leave. I’m not claiming there’s a simple answer - I understand the point that it seems unfair that an employee on leave will “get more” than an employee who wasn’t, but at the same time, this is the commitment that Google made, and I can’t shake the feeling that a mother giving birth and then using the resulting benefit that she was promised should be entirely unrelated to any notions of severance. If anything, it makes it look like Google is taking advantage of people on leave, not somehow leveling the playing field.
jmclnx 4y ago

djbusby 4y ago

FTA: Google has decided to not honor pre-approved leave Basically, going back on your word. No honour.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

endisneigh 4y ago

Isn’t the whole point of severance compensation for terminating your employment and other prior agreements, given that you are not at fault? It doesn’t really make sense for one to demand both severance and their leave. From my understanding the Google severance effectively pays you more than maternity leave anyways unless you were at Google for less than 3 years. I wonder how many are in that situation. One example in the article involved a person who had been at Google for 10 years. They would receive 36 weeks severance. More than the 24 weeks they would receive as maternity leave. It seems that person is arguing they should receive 60 weeks severance.

michaelmrose 4y ago
Most of the folks laid off aren't on any sort of maternity leave. Of the tiny fraction on maternity leave few logically will have just gone on leave the day they get laid of. Statistically if you pick a random time in a 24 week period the average remaining duration is 12 weeks. Its also meaningless to add the severance that google already agreed to pay and maternity together to decide if the total is reasonable, even more so when you are picking the edge case on an edge case of a long term worker laid off right after going on leave. It's not even clear more than one person in the whole cadre actually meets those criteria. We are talking about presumably a fraction of 1% of laid off workers receiving an average of 12 additional weeks of pay which for google is a rounding error. Most wont be receiving this benefit and of those that will the majority will have closer to 30 than 60 weeks of pay total.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

OK, I'll take a stab at defending Google's policy here. Not necessarily because I believe they're 100% in the right, but because I see so many of the arguments on the other side completely failing to address some issues of fairness, and of leaning solely into the emotional aspects of this issue ("Person <in heart-tugging situation X> was laid off!"), or just spitting out lazy comebacks ("Google is evil now!!!") I don't really see this as "Google won't honor medical leave" any more than I see this as "Google won't honor employment agreement". That is, people on medical leave get paid while they're not working but still employed (and, mind you, this is not something that's a legal requirement, but something Google does with their largess - the vast majority of companies, in the US at least, without monopolistic businesses are way less generous), and I'm not sure why being on medical leave should automatically put you in the "you can't be laid off until your leave is over" bucket. After all, tons of people who were laid off who were not on leave had plenty of important reasons they shouldn't be laid off (e.g. I'm sure lots of people had spouses or dependents on Google's health plan who were wholly dependent on it). I just see some fundamental fairness issues that aren't even commented on by people insisting Google is evil. More importantly, the root cause issue (in the US) is that so many critical benefits are linked to employment. I know that other countries have stricter laws around this (e.g. you can't be laid off on maternity leave), but that's kinda the point - with a broad legal framework of what's required, and especially with many benefits being ensured by the state (especially healthcare), it means that the individuals are not dependent on the generosity (and huge profit margins) of their particular company. I mean, the FAANGs especially like to talk about how generous they are with things like unusually long parental leave (again, relatively in the US), but that's only because they make so much money. There is a reason that restaurants, for example, could never begin to offer this level of leave, and it's not because restaurant owners are inherently more cruel. If we believe the benefits are important for societal function and fairness, we should pay for them at the societal level, instead of depending on the whims of individual employers to guarantee them.

protastus 4y ago
Yes, the root cause is that the U.S. barely has any labor laws, and this puts people in cruel situations that are inconsistent with the level of economic development achieved by this nation. Many knowledge workers expect stronger guarantees for earned benefits, out of an intuitive sense of ethics and commitment, but those expectations are more in line with labor laws found in European countries. In the U.S., workers often have no recourse or leverage against even small companies, let alone Google. "Earned" benefits evaporate once the employment contract is void.

siliconc0w 4y ago

The 'big tech' calculus to suddenly antagonize their workforce to eek out marginal 'efficiency' gains is going to backfire. People may not leave right away but a demoralized fearful workforce isn't going to innovate, or really even give a shit about the work. Teams basically haven't done anything for three months because all the work needs to be reprioritized and that can't even be done when teams still don't know who is walking dead and who isn't.

rejectfinite 4y ago
Ïs this a "big tech" issue or a "USA employment laws" issue? Dosent all comapnies do this in america?

belter 4y ago

This is the kind of petty behavior that shows there is no leadership at the helm. The CEO should be fired, not because of these specific actions, that are likely to be legal according to the US almost non existing labor laws. Instead, because of the lack of management skills and smart company leadership expected from company executives handsomely paid. As a leader, manager or CEO, you choose your wars, and your battles. This shows incompetent execution at the minimum and at worst, a hands off type of leadership only seen in the times of WeWork. Shareholders, take notice.