Why? It might be true that in the US the system is such that corporations are the property of their shareholders to do with as they please within the law, but that is a construct of a specific political process (e.g. [1]), and a different political process, like the one these employees are now engaging in could result in a different, possibly better outcome.
If the law is your only guidance, then the law allows workers to protest management decisions, even publicly, just as much as it allows them to quit. If management is allowed to do anything it wants as long as it's legal, so can employees.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...
Some people seem intent on creating drama and casting things not as their preferences but as Epic Struggles Between Good and Evil, where people who don't share their preferences are Evil. These people may not be offended by this characterization!
Life is complicated. I re-watched Schindler's List the other day, and assuming for a moment it's historically accurate, one could argue that by laboring in the factory, the workers were aiding the war effort and trading their own temporary safety for the lives of the people who would be victims of a Nazi war machine fed out of the factory's enamel pots. If someone were to actually argue that, I would just sort of stare at them like there were insane, despite not knowing how to rebut the argument except by blurting our words like "nuance" and "perspective" and "balance."
According to the movie the shells were all non-functional, so I'm not really sure why you brought that up.
"the way I delivered my — and my colleagues delivered their— preferences was not through laying down ultimatums but by having conversations..."
As a laborer, the greatest value you bring to the company is your labor. That's the only real thing that gives you leverage to negotiate the terms of your employment. At least, that's what I do when I'm looking for a new job, I'm not sure if you're just morally opposed to negotiating or something. It sounds like what happened here is this person spent a lot of time having these DEI discussions in which they did not feel heard, and that combined with an (allegedly) unprecedented change in the publication review process led to them concluding that these discussions weren't actually doing anything, so they tried to use their full leverage: the withdrawal of their labor.
It's neat that your discussions were always fruitful and you felt heard, but that isn't always the case.
That accepted conditional resignation (as someone mellifluously put it in an earlier HN discussion) is being interpreted by some as a firing. Having read the original letter, it sure sounded like a conditional resignation to me and, as a manager, I would've done my best to get the writer of the letter out the door ASAP.
Keep in mind that as an IC, I once worked for a company that imposed a 10% across the board pay cut without consulting me. I resigned the day it was announced, because my compensation is a term of employment mutually agreed to by my employer and myself, not something imposed upon me. So I've been on both sides of this.
As a general life rule, I go nuclear on people who play hardball with me, whether I am the manager or the managed.
... and then other employees raising a stink, perhaps in the hope, misguided or not, that the company will reverse its decision or change its behaviour to help its PR. The employer can use whatever power they think they have, but so can the employees. It's one thing to say that what the employees did wasn't a wise way to achieve their goal, but it's a whole other thing to say that what they did is wrong.
That's a non-sequitur. There are many things that make America, and every other country, unique. Maybe America produced Google because it's the only country with that population size that's made up virtually entirely of immigrants?
It's also an is-ought fallacy. America is also the only rich country that's built that much of its wealth on slave labour, so does that mean slave labour is a good thing?
> let their ridiculously permissive (and coddling) employer pad their bank account
As a reminder, just in case the principles of capitalism, quite ironically, elude you, the company hires employees it expects will pad its own bank account more than it pads theirs.
> Not once they realize how everyone else lives.
It is certainly true that the conditions of most Google employees are much better than those of the rest of the world, but they are so because the company's employees created that wealth.
I'm curious about this one. Most of what I've read indicates that modern American wealth was largely circumstantial due to european economies being obliterated during WW2. Do you have a source for how much slavery affected American wealth?
Different systems produce different results. It tends to be the case that when you drastically alter the fundamental properties of a system, you won’t get the same results - because it isn’t the same system.
If you want a system where a company is not the property of its shareholders, and you fail to observe that all current implementations of that idea have never demonstrated a single instance of producing Google-like companies since the industrial revolution, your ideas are not going to be very robust.
If you don’t want that, sure, this is a perfectly valid position. But you are not to be taken seriously if you make these claims while earning 7 figures at Google. You haven’t even demonstrated that your ideas are viable to you, let alone all of society.
And since the principles of capitalism apparently quite unironically elude you, yes, they expect their own bank account to be padded more than yours (as it must, game theory prevents the transaction otherwise), which is why they fired her.
And the conditions that make Google better for them were not created exclusively by employees and especially not by employees who didn’t share the mission. Nor were they created and sustained without leadership. Nor were they created without venture capital. If you cherry pick certain properties of Google and expect to be reproduce those results, you aren’t making payroll. It is only through the right balance of incentives that such a system can function at all.
Yes, but you claim to know changing which set of variables, by which amount, produced what result, while you don't actually know that. Your epistemology is emotional rather than rational.
> and you fail to observe that all current implementations of that idea have never demonstrated a single instance of producing Google-like companies since the industrial revolution, your ideas are not going to be very robust.
Not that I think Google is a great company (it's a pretty lousy one, all things considered) but it is unique, and still you don't know precisely what combination of variables unique to the US produced this particular result.
> which is why they fired her.
That's fine, but you blamed them for being sort of victims in the first place.
> And the conditions that make Google better for them were not created exclusively by employees and especially not by employees who didn’t share the mission.
I never said that.
> It is only through the right balance of incentives that such a system can function at all.
Sure, but there can be more than one right balance, and you don't know all of them. You make the mistake of thinking that if the current situation is X and you think X is good, then any other balance Y is likely worse than X.
Maybe the world would be a better place if we did. At least "My god, people need to calm down." isn't really an argument.
It's the self-righteous who are the real enemies, not the people who knowingly make the best of whatever resigned compromises they find themselves forced to make.
It is within their rights, true. But it's not just a question of law, but also ethics.
We accept that, in democratic societies, we can freely criticize our government and still stay the citizens. There are good principal and practical reasons to have it so. However, in private companies, for some reason, we don't accept it.
It is assumed that if you join a company you share their values and if you no longer share their values the barrier to leave and join another is quite low. People have different values and that is fine. Unless your employer is engaging in illegal behaviors, speaking out against their value set is just showing intolerance for other people and their values.
Move on, join up and use your time to help lift values you hold, don’t just spend all your time tearing down others. Respect the fact that others can have values different than your own.
Companies are managed by an executive team on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the shareholders. Not the employees.
Shareholders can, and do, criticise management and demand they do things differently/better, because management is ultimately responsible to them. Likewise the people can, and do, criticse governments because the government is responsible to them.
Management are not responsible to employees. Though it makes sense to not annoy them too much. But if it's a question of shareholder or employee satisfaction, then legally there's no choice.
If you are for tolerance and the coexistance of different values in society, you will understand that values come into conflict constantly. And you will respect the prerogative of employees and customers to push back when their values conflict with corporation management (who represent stockholders).
When you insist that employees must unilaterally disarm by walking away at the first sign of conflict with their employers, you are essentially expressing a class preference. You are asserting that the working class must submit to the stockholding upper class. A corporation requires capital to compete in our economy. And when the top 10% own 80% of the wealth, workers cannot simply walk away.
Stockholders can't walk away either. They need workers, just as workers need capital. So they will need to find a way to coexist, but that doesn't mean there won't be conflict. There will always be conflict. The virtue of our democracy is that the conflict is manifested as demand letters and PR statements instead of clubs and bullets.
More precisely, it is assumed that you share the values of the owners.
> Move on, join up and use your time to help lift values you hold, don’t just spend all your time tearing down others. Respect the fact that others can have values different than your own.
I see a big problem with this argument, would you say that to e.g. Belarussian freedom of speech activists? That hey, they should just respect their government has different values, and they can move elsewhere.
You're talking about "others", but you really mean "people in charge". I think it's morally wrong to exclude large majority of people, who are not in charge, from the discussion what should be the values of the collective they are part of.
I gave multiple points in my post as to why governments are different than companies (it was in fact the main point of my post). Please read it again.
Try being a member of the Democrat (or Republican) party and openly criticize the leaders of the party. You would be immediately ostracized and none of your legislation or ideas would make it through again.
At the core, we are a social species that relies on cooperation. It is critical to have people constantly questioning the herd mentality so we don't run off the cliff. But the whistle-blowing can still be done in a respectful way (unless, of course, it is egregious like breaking laws, moral issues, etc).
In this case, even if you take a critical eye towards Google, they didn't want a paper that they paid for published externally. Tough. If you want free reign, you can't be part of an organization that pays your paycheck every two weeks.
Also note that this does not mean that the paper was not read and reviewed within Google and might have effected some change there. And it could have been published externally if she had taken the review comments into consideration and included some of the ways Google was trying to mitigate the problems - something that would actually be interesting and relevant to the paper
If you want to be an activist, go join a non-profit.
The idea that we can’t criticize companies in a thread full of criticism of Google is just plain silly. Of course you can criticize companies. But if you’re criticizing your employer, you do have to accept the risk of there being private consequences. This has always been the case.
Heck, it’s not just limited to employers. If I was to walk into my local Starbucks and make a nuisance of myself by screaming, I’ll be banned. That’s not a violation of my free speech rights, nobody is prosecuting me, but it’s an obvious consequence of my speech.
1. Speak up internally.
2. Speak up externally.
3. Speak to the media.
Do you think the Uber sexual harassment whistleblower should have kept quiet?
eg. Disabling safety equipment so that a job can be completed faster - illegal
Locating toys and candy to low shelves at registers so that children see them and nag their parents to buy them, increasing sales. - unethical in my view but called good marketing by many others.
Maybe if more employees used their leverage to improve companies from within we could see real progress in work environments and corporate ethics without having to wait on legislation or lawsuits to force companies to change.
Honest question - which part has gone too far?
Feel like there are currently a lot of parts.
It's not ethical concerns. It's competition concerns veiled as ethical ones.
For fun reading, here are the companies that the Norwegian wealth fund refuses to invest in because of ethical concerns (they recently removed Raytheon from this list when they exited the business of cluster bombs): https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/responsible-investment/exclu...