I’m honestly somewhat surprised that these firings haven’t triggered a mass walkout or something at Google offices yet. They’re being very cavalier with employees they spend so much effort (at least historically) on keeping in the office to work “free” hours.
The labour situation is one that people don’t want to risk it. Even 150k jobs are fucking good right now.
My BSc+MSc+BEng degree-holder buddy with a rich resume laden with FAANGs is still challenged to land a permanent role after a year. He’d DEFINITELY not give a fuck while he can feed his family.
Would you walk out of your 250,000/year software engineer gig over this? Most people won’t and don’t. Go to work, get paid, and live your life how you want.
When my co-workers get terminated for political criticism? Yeah, I would. Lots of tech workers would and do — remember the Blizzard walkout several years ago? At the very least, this is the type of thing that spurs white collars to form unions.
Is 250k the average wage or just the superstars?
I’m not. Most people work a job to get paid and that’s it.
Google pays well, so they don’t care if their work is being used for genocide.
It’s the crapitalist way.™
Some of the protesting workers have said the company has a double standard when it comes to which employees it disciplines. Other Google workers have posted the names and photos of pro-Palestinian workers online, “doxing” them and opening them up to harassment from people on social media, the workers have said.
Seems like it’s not an entirely unpopular action with the staff.
“Google isnt the place for your politics. It is only a place for my politics. So get in line with my thinking or get the fuck out!” - Googles Chief Cunt.
If it wasn’t for politics then they shouldn’t take government contracts
Or fire people because of politics.
I’m just hearing Google advocating for a strict ban on lobbyism.
I mean, otherwise it’s discrimination, no?
Or lobby.
Indeed ! This Would be much easier to take seriously if Sundar hadn’t meet with Sunak, Modi, Biden et al. In the first year or so since getting the job.
“Officially, of course, I have no opinion.”
“The workplace isn’t for politics” is about social etiquette, not criticizing what your own company is taking part in you stupid fuck.
Sounds to me like these tech workers could really use a good union to protect them…
Why do you need to bring politics into it?
/s
Sounds like political talk
There was a subset of Google contractors trying to unionize but while the group was campaigning at city hall. Google executives decided to not renew the contract and all of them were jobless.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/01/youtube-union-contractor-layoffs/
Sounds like political talk
Massive respect to the workers who sacrificed their jobs to highlight Google’s scummy behaviour.
Never worked for one of the big tech firms, but I have been in the working world for ~16 years and one of the few things anyone that has been around for awhile can and will agree on is you don’t talk about salary within earshot of the boss, you don’t badmouth company decisions within earshot of the boss, you don’t talk about politically charged topics, and you certainly don’t combine 2 of those 3 and protest company decisions on politically charged issues literally in the office.
You also don’t do those things on company provided equipment, software, or services. If you want to bitch about something the company is doing, you go out to lunch or do it after hours, preferably without written or video evidence.
While I think it is gross that Google fired them for this, given the history of the company almost encouraging such things, I can say these people just got a hard lesson that most of us learn about the corporate world long before we make it to working for the likes of Google.
Rightly or wrongly freedom of speech, assembly, etc protects you from the Government, not your boss. And your boss is a petty little ego maniac that controls your livelihood, so best to stay out of his gaze on matters you know he/she would view negatively where at all possible.
They weren’t just making a random protest. It was intended to show leadership their dissatisfaction. When your company is the size of tens of thousands of employees, your only real way to get within earshot is something like a protest.
Rightly or wrongly freedom of speech, assembly, etc protects you from the Government, not your boss.
Tired of this. The 1st amendment protects you from the government, but the idea of “freedom of speech” is much broader than that. We are allowed to be dissatisfied with how speech is suppressed even if a government is not involved.
And like it or not they are allowed to fire you for voicing that dissatisfaction. Don’t like it? Protesting the company is the wrong seat of power to point your dissatisfaction at. “Freedom of speech” says you can say what you want, but does not mean you are free from the consequences of that speech either when it comes to your dealings with non-government bodies.
Unless the goal is to make a political statement with your departure.
exactly, which is what those workers did, they could’ve just resigned but they wanted to make a political statement and they did so
All of which is a problem, not something we should passively accept as the status quo. These employees were advocating for change to fix exactly those sorts of problems.
I’m shocked that people are only just now finding out that massive companies like Google are evil. Google replaced don’t be evil with be evil.
Based Google
Weird how all the right wingers that constantly yell about how silencing nazis is censorship are suddenly very quiet when a ceo comes out and explicitly says you will be fired for your speech.
It is on course for conservatives. It’s all about their freedom of speech not anyone else’s freedom of speech.
How exactly do you identify if someone criticizing Google for this doesn’t support free speech for nazis?
Because Sundar Pichai is woke. Nice try at gashlighting though.
“I share that feeling and especially regret that this happened during Pride month when we should be celebrating the incredible LGBTQ+ community you all have built at Google.” https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/12/18663017/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-lgbtq-employees-letter-harassment
Not silent. They change the tactic to “what were they expecting?” or “of course they got fired for that, everyone knows you’ll get fired for that”. The phrase “don’t reveal your power level” exists among them for a reason.
What are you talking about?
Look at how many people are criticizing google for this.
Do you just assume everyone who supports free speech only does it for nazis? That’s not how free speech works, sonny.
I see the alt-right is out of school early today!
Still waiting for first period to start
Didn’t read the article. But what I take from the title is that Google is going to stop paying lobbyists…
No politics in the workplace ftw!
The pendulum is swinging back hard. Let’s just hope we don’t end up way deep into the danger since zone just because woke idiots couldn’t leave “good enough” alone.
Lol I can’t help but laugh at the disparity between the left vs. the right, when it comes to just general ability to speak coherently. Like is this even a coherent thought?
Like this is the best they’ve got. I guess it’s no wonder then that charlatans like Jordan Peterson can sink their hooks in so easily.
Good enough alone… Please elaborate on that.
If you are a woman, do you think society was in better shape in 2012 or today? Standing Confederate monuments, hostility to trans people, and all?
That’s kind of a word salad there. In 2012 things may have been generally better for women in the USA due to Roe v. Wade standing, and there were more Confederate monuments than there are standing now, and trans people were generally not accepted by society as well as they are now. So I’m not sure what your point was.
The mixture is my point. Some things are better. Some things are worse. I specified for women because the backlash against woke has already hurt women badly.
The republiclowns taking away womens rights and blaming trans and gay people for their problems is much worse now than in 2012. This country lacks education which would solve all these problems, but educated people won’t blindly follow fox “news” and as a result there wouldn’t be many republicans in office which is why they’re doing everything they can along with help from Russia to hurt the education system and keep people ignorant. The result of better education would likely mean we’d step out of third world territory and get healthcare for all, including mental health which would increase the blue votes even more all the while decreasing mass shootings.
That doesn’t fly with the rich. Why do you pay more taxes than the rich? Trickle down? How’s that working out? They piss in your face and tell you it’s a trans persons fault, or an immigrant and the cult gets their pitchforks. It’s silly. It’s almost as silly as the gop backing a fucking domestic terrorist with 91 FELONIES.
My god they really hit the home run with a brand new excuse just to fire a few more people huh?
