The complaint centers on a Code of Conduct that the employees signed, and then that the employees were terminated for speaking out internally about what they felt was a violation of the "don't be evil" motto. I'm not sufficiently familiar with California employment and contract law to know how much of a leg this case has, but on a quick scan, one of the counts (discrimination due to sexual identity) is dead in motion-to-dismiss phase, one (slander) might survive if amended, and the other three will turn on whether or not the Code of Conduct's statements that employees should speak up about perceived violations of "don't be evil" is enough like a contract to make retaliation in firing because of it a violation of contract.
Notably, it never asks the court to decide if its acts were or were not evil. It's not insane enough to be thrown out immediately, but there's several facts about the Code of Conduct I'd want to learn about that aren't in the complaint.
[1] This should be standard practice for anyone reporting on legal cases, and it frustrates me to no end that it is not.
No such count exists in the complaint! There is a component of Count V of that type but Count V can stand without it.
That said, the other bits in Count V are also fairly weak, though the sex/orientation/identity one is the weakest.
> one (slander) might survive if amended,
Not sure why you say that; while obviously the facts require trial the slander/false light charge seems to make all the necessary claims to establish the tort.
Defamation generally is a difficult charge to prove, although I doubt that the plaintiffs qualify as a public figure which makes actual malice (the most difficult element) irrelevant. I don't have a strong sense of how much of the elements of defamation are necessary in the pleading stage, especially the degree to which a pleading statement is fact versus conclusory allegation. In particular, paragraph 49 seems rather conclusory on the nature of damages actually suffered to reputation.
In that sense, if the allegation is deficient in the complaint, it's deficient in a way that an amended complaint would easily fix.
If the company says "xyz isn't evil" explicitly, then the motto doesn't give you the right to work against that.
This lawsuit is just childish.
>"There are all sorts of contract terms that a jury is required to interpret: 'don't be evil' is not so 'out there' as to be unenforceable," she said. "Since Google's contract tells employees that they can be fired for failing to abide by the motto, 'don't be evil,' it must have meaning."
Step 2. Deal with thousands of internal lawsuits related to "social justice" and internal squabbling.
If a court could look at a situation and determine that it is evil, then what is the point of determining whether it is legal or not? What if you came to the conclusion that something is illegal but not evil or evil but not legal? You pretty much undermine the construct of law in the first place and the existence of the court itself
Many contract disputes boil down to the definition of the term "reasonable" so why would "evil" be different? Ultimately it's on Google for including the word in legal documents.
Are you treating that as fact?
Obviously I haven't looked at the paperwork for every fired employee (and probably no one will ever get to), but I think they have some other pretext. "<employee> was fired for being evil" is not a phrase you'll ever find.
> Failure of a member of our extended workforce or other covered service provider to follow the Code can result in termination of their relationship with Google.
> don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
The reverse here is that the employees are allowed to quit. Google isn't trying to sue any employees for "being evil".
>But the plaintiffs' lawyer, Laurie Burgess, said it is not beyond what courts regularly must decide.
Sounds like the lawyer is taking them for a ride on their dime, imo.
They basically say don't be evil was part of the employment contract (via the code of conduct), the employees fulfilled their obligation to advise Google not to be evil, and then Google fired them.
From wikipedia:
The elements of promissory estoppel are:
* an express or implied promise;
* detrimental reliance by the promisee foreseeable to a reasonable person in the promissor's position;
* actual detrimental reliance by the promisee (worsening of their position); and for specific performance (as opposed to reliance damages), injustice can only be avoided by enforcing the promise.
Point by point:
* Google promised to not be evil because every employee (including the CEO and members of the board) agrees to the code of conduct.
* The promisee (employees) relied on that when they made their decition to work at google and enter the contract. That was reasonably foreseeable by the promissor (Google).
* The employees actually did rely on the promise when they took the job, and circulated the petition to not be evil, since they were promised all employees agreed to it. No comment on the specific performance remedy since I didn't read that far to see if that's what they're demanding.
Obviously there's points in there that could be reasonably debated, but it seems not-crazy enough to make it past a motion to dismiss.
If something seems like a dumb case mostly designed to enrich the plaintiff attorney on the face of it, it most likely is a dumb case mostly intended to enrich the plaintiff attorney.
"Don't be evil" falls pretty neatly under the definition of an illusory promise because it is "indefinite or vague."
Under the Restatement (Second) of Contracts:
"Illusory promises; mere statements of intention. Words of promise which by their terms make performance entirely optional with the “promisor” whatever may happen, or whatever course of conduct in other respects he may pursue, do not constitute a promise."
The fact that the plaintiff attorney did not mention the concept of an illusory promise does not bode well for its chances, because the judge will certainly bring it up, and the defense will also certainly bring it up. This should have been addressed directly, since it is the most obvious defense to this claim. There are other defenses as well that were not brought up and addressed, such as that the nonsense claims related to media articles had any bearing whatsoever on any alleged breach of contract.
Notwithstanding this, "Don't Be Evil" should have never been in any official code of conduct; it should have stayed in the realm of puffery to avoid exactly this type of problem. This is why everyone hates lawyers and other assorted 'fun police' personalities. This was a lazily written complaint that did not really get into the important nitty gritty of why these particular employees were injured.
Further, maybe this is one of those California things that lets you get out of arbitration, but these employees are almost certainly bound by an arbitration agreement. Not mentioning why you get to dodge the forced arbitration clause in your contract in the complaint is annoying to the court and will also make it less likely to survive the obvious motion to dismiss due to the binding arbitration requirement.
Probably this?
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
>(f) Nothing in this section is intended to invalidate a written arbitration agreement that is otherwise enforceable under the Federal Arbitration Act (9 U.S.C. Sec. 1 et seq.).
Google employees to my knowledge usually get lassoed with arbitration agreements. Not unheard of for plaintiff attorneys to sell clients who are bound by arbitration on a lawsuit that cannot survive the motion to dismiss on that basis.
If your contract stipulates that you (and your employer) should "do no evil" without supplying a definition for "evil" then it really isn't that much different to any other contractual breach. Also, you'd have to be stupid to put that in an actual contract.
Assuming she's not on contingency, or getting paid by some external group.
>The issue is that, before the 2008 global financial crisis, Goldman had gone around saying things like “our clients’ interests always come first” and “integrity and honesty are at the heart of our business.” Then the global financial crisis occurred, and:
> 1. It came out that maybe Goldman’s clients’ interests sometimes came second, and maybe integrity and honesty were sometimes not quite at the heart of its business[1]; and
> 2. Goldman’s stock price went down.
>[...]
>Perhaps in 2007, investors read in Goldman’s disclosures that “our clients’ interests always come first” and “integrity and honesty are at the heart of our business,” and they thought: “Yes, it is good that Goldman has integrity and puts its clients’ interests first, that is valuable for its business, we will buy the stock.” In 2009, after Abacus and so forth, investors thought “alas, no, Goldman does not have integrity and does not put its clients’ interests first, we are disappointed, we will sell the stock.” In other words, perhaps investors ascribed value to Goldman’s statements about integrity and honesty, and then when they found out that those statements were not true that value went away and the stock went down.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-06-22/money-...
The case isn't asking a US Court to find that. It is asking a California State Court to find that challenging corporate involvement in a particular federal action on the same moral grounds that the State of California was challenging the underlying federal action at the same time was reasonably either or a combination of (a) within the ambit of an obligation undertaken to raise potential “evil” actions, or (b) legally protected political activity, or (c) legally protected discussion of working conditions.
(And there's a couple other things in it that could succeed even if those all fail, notably the slander charge about knowingly false information spread about involvement in public leaks.)
However, even given all of that, I do not believe it is possible for Google to exist without being complicit with the overall purpose of CBP.
I don't see any particularly salient dividing line between generically working with them and not.
There might be something evil about the details of the particular project, but if CBP as a whole is evil, I don't comprehend how working with them automatically makes a difference when you are based in the US anyway.
I can swallow "a US court adjudicating which acts are evil" much easier than "a US court adjudicating which major parts of the US government are generally evil".
The latter seems like some sort of propaganda fantasy, a snake eating its tail.
The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.
Stalin [insert very bad historical person here] could have certainly utilized reason in the course of pursuing evil actions for example. The scope there is narrowed down to specific actions. If you broaden back out, you can say that Stalin is acting irrational by committing heinous acts in the first place, but that's only the case if you're defining the standard of what is good on his behalf (as opposed to what he may consider good to be). You'd be imposing your standard, the foundation of your morality, on him.
Morality depends on first defining the standard of what the good is. From there you can extrapolate the rest, you can construct a system forward. Stalin and I will disagree on the standard of what the good is, and as such we'll reach different conclusions on a lot of things. From his standard, he can take rational actions, make rational decisions that align with his aims - they're rational as it pertains to what he's pursuing, what his standard is.
One can entirely disagree with the standards that someone else holds, of course. Their behavior may be evil by your standard for example, and vice versa. You could argue that there is one objective standard for The Good (thus everyone else not following that is immoral to the degree they diverge), however good luck convincing most people to go along with that (it'll never happen).
Is putting these people in a gulag rational? Well that depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
In this case, the tossing out would be along the lines of "the facts alleged in the complaint are, even if true, insufficient to let you bring this lawsuit" (or, more succinctly, "failure to state a claim [upon which relief can be granted]").
Whether an act is "evil" is a theological question, so to the extent plaintiffs are actually relying on the word "evil", separation of church and state will prevent the court from even considering their claims.
[Most?] atheists have moral codes. Yours is not necessarily mine. Sorry to be pedantic, but implications of atheist unity really bug me.
The aliens observing our supposed primitiveness are just the ones that came out on top in their latest civil war and went out exploring using the technology that the 14,000 years of war cultivated.
Maybe they're the most obnoxious, spoiled, entitled assholes you could ever imagine. Luck rolled their way ten thousand times in a row and they act like it.
There's absolutely no good reason to default to believing aliens are likely to be far more enlightened than we are.
There's no good reason to imagine some civilisation has figured out how to cross the vast interstellar distances and then pop in to see us during their lifetime.
Since we are already in the realm of pure fantasy, it doesn't alter the argument's validity to also assume these magical creatures are enlightened.
If you go back a couple hundred years and talk to the people then I imagine you could achieve a similar effect. They were just as certain they were correct as we are, and they are just as wrong.
Whether challenging an act is within the reasonable scope of a contractual obligation to report suspected evil is, however, not a theological question, and does not involve deciding the question of whether the act is, in fact, evil, whether or not that is a theological question (it is not, necessarily, it is a moral question.)
There is a Wikipedia article about something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem
How could anything possibly happen other than getting tossed out of court immediately? They want US courts to adjudicate which acts are and are not "evil"?