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Personally, I like Google's response to this, and the whole idea of publicly campaigning against your employer (especially during normal business hours) is comp

Personally, I like Google's response to this, and the whole idea of publicly campaigning against your employer (especially during normal business hours) is completely foreign to me. Maybe I'm just an old fogey, but "back in my day" you'd earn lots of money and then go use that money to advance your social causes on your own time and in your own way. If you disagree with the company's direction, then do what you can through normal channels to change it. If you don't have that kind of power, then vote with your feet and leave. Go work somewhere else. Go start your own company and run it how you want. And BTW, if your protest can't have any meaningful consequences to you - if there's no real potential "cost" to you - then it's not a protest but a performance.

kevinh 2y ago
This protest did have a cost for them - they were fired.
- dbrueck 2y ago
  Exactly, and that's how it should be. But all too often (both with this protest and earlier ones at Google), the people who receive consequences seem shocked about being fired.
  - happytoexplain 2y ago
    This is the classic fallacy of "outrage == surprise". You can expect a person or entity might do something you personally find morally wrong and still sound angry when it happens - that's not hypocrisy or ignorance. You might even use words like "shocking" to describe their behavior, because, no matter how expected it might be, immoral behavior is shocking - and should be! Long story short, sometimes people try to use "expectation" to downplay bad behavior, and that's clearly irrelevant. The "expectation" for a business to do absolutely anything legal for profit is perhaps the most common manifestation of this fallacy.
    - dbrueck 2y ago
      No, no fallacy - in interviews with activist employees who got fired, it's not uncommon to see both surprise as well as outrage. Regardless, I was commenting on the ones who seem genuinely surprised that being fired was a possible outcome of their protests. It's as if that possibility never crossed their minds, which is itself surprising.
- achow 2y ago
  They didn't know (expect?) that will happen when they started the protest.
smegsicle 2y ago
as someone pointed out in one of the other threads, they may have been acting like it was a college protest
- paulmd 2y ago
  almost as if there is an intuitive sense of fairness here, that the rules are/should-be different for institutions that are socially-significant "gatekeepers"...
  - paulmd 2y ago
    To clarify this a little further: I don't think you can do a sit-in and not expect retaliation. And that's how the labor-managment pushback works. It doesn't mean the labor retaliation won't be justified either - and if Taft-Hartley becomes so neutered that it's no longer sufficient to hold the center, well... But I generally do think that Google, Apple, etc employees should probably enjoy broadly similar protections to government employees in their private-time expressions. Saying "because you work for bell labs, you can't have opinions" is brutally suppressive of what amounts to today's idle intellectual class. Engineers are almost uniquely in a position to have a think about it all.
UtopiaPunk 2y ago
"Back in my day..." Labor disputes have been around since the beginnings of capitalism. Look at the Luddites or the Battle of Blair Mountain.
- dbrueck 2y ago
  Of course. But there's a huge difference between labor disputes - renegotiating your relationship with the company - and folks in the trenches trying to steer top level decisions according to their personal world views. Most companies simply are not very good vehicles for bringing about social change. But that's ok, that's not what they are for, and there are much better avenues. It's fine to use the money you earn from a company to fund your efforts to further your cause, but trying to use someone else's company to further your cause directly is almost always a mistake.
  - UtopiaPunk 2y ago
    "Most companies simply are not very good vehicles for bringing about social change." That's just not true. Corporations have been maybe the single biggest driver of social change in the last couple of centuries, short of military overthrows of governments (although, even then such overthrows are often done to benefit corporations). For good and ill, corporations have transformed the world, and they set and maintain the status quo, especially in the Unites States. Just the idea that immense piles of wealth and resources can "belong" solely to one person or a very small group of individuals is a status quo set by capitalists to maintain their own interests. Why are they not allowed to be challenged? Their actions affect the lives of others, and it is right and good to challenge their decisions that cause harm.
    - dbrueck 2y ago
      >> "Most companies simply are not very good vehicles for bringing about social change." > That's just not true. Corporations have been maybe the single biggest driver of social change in the last couple of centuries I'd wager that most experts of modern history would vehemently disagree with your assertion, but even if they didn't, what you said and what I said are not contradictory. > right and good to challenge their decisions that cause harm This right here is, in a nutshell, why. Speaking generally, today there is a desire to distill all big, complex issues down to a binary right and wrong. I think that urge has always existed, but in the era of tweets and hot takes and memes, the yearning for everything to fit into a sound bite is overwhelming. And terms like 'harm' have come to mean just about anything. The problem, of course, is that no big, complex issue is that simple - if it were, there wouldn't tend to be much debate about it. Instead there is nuance, there are tradeoffs or different paths to get to a goal, different priorities. Even when there is that occasional something that is unambiguously a question of right vs wrong, there are umpteen options for what to do about it. So you have a company that has tens of thousands of different customers. And then you have some middle-to-bottom employee who decides that one particular customer is anathema, and that it is completely wrong to do any business with that customer at all. There's no room for debate because that employee sees things completely black and white - that customer is evil, period, and they speak of that customer with lots of hyperbole. No company can thrive when it can be steered by a random employee like that (and heaven forbid you get into a situation where you have 2 of them who see issues as black and white but take the exact opposite sides, haha). Yeah, if they are unwilling to be pragmatic, then really the best option for everyone involved is for those types of people to leave the company - if they want to make those big direction decisions, their best bet is to start something of their own.
evanelias 2y ago
I recently watched the HBO show Enlightened (co-created/written by Mike White, of White Lotus fame), which is largely about an overly idealistic employee trying to steer her big evil corporate employer towards social change. Lots of parallels here re: naivety/surprise/outrage when this doesn't work out quite how she envisioned. Interestingly, that show is from 2011! While the whole "activist employee during business hours" thing feels like a far more recent phenomenon to me, apparently it's been happening for a while? Maybe it's just becoming more widespread lately.

kevinh 2y ago

This protest did have a cost for them - they were fired.

dbrueck 2y ago
Exactly, and that's how it should be. But all too often (both with this protest and earlier ones at Google), the people who receive consequences seem shocked about being fired.
- happytoexplain 2y ago
  This is the classic fallacy of "outrage == surprise". You can expect a person or entity might do something you personally find morally wrong and still sound angry when it happens - that's not hypocrisy or ignorance. You might even use words like "shocking" to describe their behavior, because, no matter how expected it might be, immoral behavior is shocking - and should be! Long story short, sometimes people try to use "expectation" to downplay bad behavior, and that's clearly irrelevant. The "expectation" for a business to do absolutely anything legal for profit is perhaps the most common manifestation of this fallacy.
  - dbrueck 2y ago
    No, no fallacy - in interviews with activist employees who got fired, it's not uncommon to see both surprise as well as outrage. Regardless, I was commenting on the ones who seem genuinely surprised that being fired was a possible outcome of their protests. It's as if that possibility never crossed their minds, which is itself surprising.
achow 2y ago
They didn't know (expect?) that will happen when they started the protest.

smegsicle 2y ago

as someone pointed out in one of the other threads, they may have been acting like it was a college protest

paulmd 2y ago
almost as if there is an intuitive sense of fairness here, that the rules are/should-be different for institutions that are socially-significant "gatekeepers"...
- paulmd 2y ago
  To clarify this a little further: I don't think you can do a sit-in and not expect retaliation. And that's how the labor-managment pushback works. It doesn't mean the labor retaliation won't be justified either - and if Taft-Hartley becomes so neutered that it's no longer sufficient to hold the center, well... But I generally do think that Google, Apple, etc employees should probably enjoy broadly similar protections to government employees in their private-time expressions. Saying "because you work for bell labs, you can't have opinions" is brutally suppressive of what amounts to today's idle intellectual class. Engineers are almost uniquely in a position to have a think about it all.

UtopiaPunk 2y ago

"Back in my day..." Labor disputes have been around since the beginnings of capitalism. Look at the Luddites or the Battle of Blair Mountain.

dbrueck 2y ago
Of course. But there's a huge difference between labor disputes - renegotiating your relationship with the company - and folks in the trenches trying to steer top level decisions according to their personal world views. Most companies simply are not very good vehicles for bringing about social change. But that's ok, that's not what they are for, and there are much better avenues. It's fine to use the money you earn from a company to fund your efforts to further your cause, but trying to use someone else's company to further your cause directly is almost always a mistake.
- UtopiaPunk 2y ago
  "Most companies simply are not very good vehicles for bringing about social change." That's just not true. Corporations have been maybe the single biggest driver of social change in the last couple of centuries, short of military overthrows of governments (although, even then such overthrows are often done to benefit corporations). For good and ill, corporations have transformed the world, and they set and maintain the status quo, especially in the Unites States. Just the idea that immense piles of wealth and resources can "belong" solely to one person or a very small group of individuals is a status quo set by capitalists to maintain their own interests. Why are they not allowed to be challenged? Their actions affect the lives of others, and it is right and good to challenge their decisions that cause harm.
  - dbrueck 2y ago
    >> "Most companies simply are not very good vehicles for bringing about social change." > That's just not true. Corporations have been maybe the single biggest driver of social change in the last couple of centuries I'd wager that most experts of modern history would vehemently disagree with your assertion, but even if they didn't, what you said and what I said are not contradictory. > right and good to challenge their decisions that cause harm This right here is, in a nutshell, why. Speaking generally, today there is a desire to distill all big, complex issues down to a binary right and wrong. I think that urge has always existed, but in the era of tweets and hot takes and memes, the yearning for everything to fit into a sound bite is overwhelming. And terms like 'harm' have come to mean just about anything. The problem, of course, is that no big, complex issue is that simple - if it were, there wouldn't tend to be much debate about it. Instead there is nuance, there are tradeoffs or different paths to get to a goal, different priorities. Even when there is that occasional something that is unambiguously a question of right vs wrong, there are umpteen options for what to do about it. So you have a company that has tens of thousands of different customers. And then you have some middle-to-bottom employee who decides that one particular customer is anathema, and that it is completely wrong to do any business with that customer at all. There's no room for debate because that employee sees things completely black and white - that customer is evil, period, and they speak of that customer with lots of hyperbole. No company can thrive when it can be steered by a random employee like that (and heaven forbid you get into a situation where you have 2 of them who see issues as black and white but take the exact opposite sides, haha). Yeah, if they are unwilling to be pragmatic, then really the best option for everyone involved is for those types of people to leave the company - if they want to make those big direction decisions, their best bet is to start something of their own.

evanelias 2y ago

I recently watched the HBO show Enlightened (co-created/written by Mike White, of White Lotus fame), which is largely about an overly idealistic employee trying to steer her big evil corporate employer towards social change. Lots of parallels here re: naivety/surprise/outrage when this doesn't work out quite how she envisioned. Interestingly, that show is from 2011! While the whole "activist employee during business hours" thing feels like a far more recent phenomenon to me, apparently it's been happening for a while? Maybe it's just becoming more widespread lately.