Comment by slivym
7 years ago
All of their demands seem pretty reasonable. It looks like the big gripe is that basically there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. To draw an analogy, this would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable, so why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website.
> there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office.
There shouldn't be a "process" set by Google when it comes to sexual harassment, employees should be able to sue, that's the process,sexual harassment is a crime, they can't sue because Google force them into arbitration, which should be illegal for an employer to do that to an employee IMHO. this is a denial of justice.
Employers have a duty of care to protect employees from harm in the workplace, and that includes protection from sexual abuse.
A lot stuff that counts as sexual harassment in the work place is not a crime.
You don't sue people who perpetrate crimes, you prosecute them. You're asking the victims of sexual harassment to persuade police to investigate and prosecutors to prosecute, and we know that they won't because we know they already don't.
You're also saying that no action can be taken without meeting the very high criminal burden of proof - that this thing happened beyond all reasonable doubt. That's going to leave harassers free to continue.
Maybe you just meant that sexual harassment is unlawful and employees have an existing remedy through civil courts, but this would be pisspoor management. If your company employs people who reduce productivity of others in the workforce by sexually harassing them it's in the organisation's best interest to manage those people so they stop the harassment or leave the company.
> Employers have a duty of care to protect employees from harm in the workplace
Yet common bullying and generally abusive workplaces are completely legal in California. You have the right to quit anytime, not much else.
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I think you're being too rigid. There are situations where one employee forces themselves on another at the christmas party. In that situation obviously the right call is to report it to the police and to have a disciplinary process internally for gross misconduct. But there's a million smaller examples of harassment that just need to be tackled by the organization. For example, if a man repeatedly makes comments about a woman's appearance, there needs to be a process where the woman can report that, be heard and have the issue addressed - it may be as simple as the employee's boss pulling the into a room and saying "stop being a creep". Not everything is solved by law suits.
However, obviously if things do escalate, access to the law should be guaranteed and the binding arbitration should clearly be dropped.
It's odd how on one hand, the consensus here is that the quality of the work environment is very important to the productivity and the wellbeing of employees. And on the other hand, people argue that this type of misconduct should not be punished unless it's literally illegal.
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Prosecution is one method of deterring thieves from robbing my store blind. I have also tried locked doors, security cameras and not leaving the store unattended.
I like your argument that it is cheaper to just let people rob me blind and then burn time and energy catching them, prosecuting time, and hoping for a conviction as a deterrent.
With any luck using your system crime will magically disappear on it’s own.
I am going to put my fingers in my ears now and make noises and ignore the worlds problems. It is certainly easier to not take responsibility. Good advice.
Comparing sexual assault to a store robbery in a tone of sarcasm is at best a poor judgement call.
I agree that assaulters need to take responsibility for their actions. However, when they don't, the law needs to be there to protect the victims.
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> There shouldn't be a "process" set by Google when it comes to sexual harassment, employees should be able to sue, that's the process,
Except that, under the law, the company’s response (including the absence or inadequacy of any process) to certain situations is part of what determines if they are sexual harassment.
> sexual harassment is a crime
No, it's not, and if it were the process would not be for employees to sue, because crimes are prosecuted exclusively by the government in the U.S. legal system.
it's a different country, but ... in India in 2013 some types of sexual harassment were deemed criminal and punishable by time in prison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_(Amendment)_Act,_...
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That’s actually not true, it varies by state, but many allow private criminal prosecutions to occur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution
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forced arbitration has been the bane of combatting anything legally. it basically is now used to completely remove any employee or consumer ability to sue. This is used for literally everything. Every employer does this now, every software product, every hardware.
I don't understand how this is even acceptable.
Because it doesn't actually do that. Only in the u.s. do people believe that suing over anything and everything is an efficient or effective mechanism of justice
"Sue it out" is probably the least effective possible conflict resolution mechanism along almost any axis.
The underlying goal of arbitration is to ensure effective resolution of non-complex situations and reserve the courts for actually complex cases, instead of now, where they are used because people hope they can make a bunch of money.
The only thing I'm aware of is people complain of bias of arbitrators using the proxy of how often business wins relative to people in courts (with no evaluation of whether people should be winning as much as they do in court).
Otherwise I have seen nothing that suggests that arbitration is not in fact very effective and efficient at reducing the cost and time involved.
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I'm not trying to troll you, but it's a voluntary "denial of justice". No one compels or coerces people to seek employment there. They apply, go through several interviews, and then voluntarily agree to whatever it is they agree to before day #1 of work. As long as people are willing to work there under XYZ conditions, people will continue to work there under XYZ conditions.
By the same token, employees are allowed to advocate for change once they are working there.
People voluntarily entered into indentured servitude once upon a time, too.
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>employees should be able to sue, that's the process,
See eh. Does money fix the issue "biotic 1 told biotic 2 'nice lady bits why don't you sit on my man bits' now they want 2 amounts of monies" how does money fix the issue? How does money repair the damage? Is money a Men in Black neuralizer? Does it selectively delete the negative emotions from the event? Is it fair that shareholders in the case of Google, or the owner in a small business where some rogue employee decided he wanted to play grabass without the owner's consent or even knowledge, to have to shell out large sums of money that won't actually undo the damage?
I don't think suing is a good solution here. If you are denied a job and have EVIDENCE it was based on your gender or sexual orientation, then suing somewhat makes sense however aside from lost wages there isn't much that would be productive here. If you sued for the actual job then everyone knows you as that person that got the job because a court of law said you get it and not necessarily because your skill and history make you the best candidate.
>sexual harassment is a crime,
Somewhat. Quid Pro Quo is a crime, not rectifying a hostile work environment (not reassigning the alleged offender, not investigating and terminating the alleged offender etc) is a crime. But biotic 1 telling biotic 2 that they have nice reproductive bits and bobs, is not an actual crime (perhaps it should be?)
>they can't sue because Google force them into arbitration, which should be illegal for an employer to do that to an employee IMHO. this is a denial of justice.
Money /= justice. If someone demands sexual favors, or regularly says sexually explicit things to you, a check doesn't give you justice, especially if it's from the employer.
Take Google as an example. Google is owned, in part, by likely hundreds of millions of people (index funds, direct stock purchase, etc). Google has a board, it has various rungs of corporate management, then more localized management. Chances are none of those people have said "hey Don Draper, make sure you grab Megan's ass today when she comes in to dictate for you today and tell her what you want to do to her on your desk" and while Google does need to do something to employees that think such behavior is acceptable, and carry it out, why should they have to cut a check for hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars, for something a rogue employee did?
Perhaps there should be some sort of penalty/tax that companies, when sufficient evidence is found to support a claim, they have to pay to an NGO that deals with rights equality and safe workspaces? Money doesn't undo the situation so I don't think the victim should be seeking large sums in damages, companies (unless supporting the behavior) shouldn't be penalized for large sums of money because of an employee that has free agency, however if an incident is reasonably provable perhaps they should have to cut a check, based on some sort of scale, say 100k$ for a company like Google to a regularly audited group that provides resources for victims to reach out to for both any required treatment and for help dealing with any potential workplace discrimination as a result of their claim.
Maybe they should unionize? They could then elect representatives and have a seat at the table with management.
> Maybe they should unionize? They could then elect representatives and have a seat at the table with management.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_VL4gqrCHc&t=392
But if they did that, they be giving up control over their careers and the right to deal with their problems with their supervisors, one on one. /s
They definitely have a process in place (they advertise their process a lot during orientation) but the demands I saw explicitly say they aren't good enough.
> this would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable, so why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website.
Because, Google is a company that builds products. I am interested in their products and in the fact that their products work, not much in the behaviour of the people building them- given the fact that they are located in a supposedly civilized country anyway, where serious misconducts should be prosecuted by law. The internal squabbles and complaints of the company are of very little relevance for their users, as it should be.
It's worth noting that one of their demands is dropping the binding arbitration that essentially forces employees to forgo their right to legal recourse for civil matters. Not every instance of unacceptable behaviour is a criminal matter.
If you're not interested in the internal workings of Google, then why bother? There are people who are, and they are the ones driving this conversation. Let them spend their energy and effort figuring it out while you enjoy the result of their work.
> why bother?
Because I'm a bit annoyed by what seems to me a growing push towards confusing the judgement of someone's work with their moral qualities. I see it as fundamentally anti-intellectual, as it strives to bring extraneous criteria in the evaluation of what should stand and be judged on its own. A scientific theory or a work of art aren't less valuable because their authors or proponents are or aren't communists, or arians; a literary masterpiece isn't diminished by the fact that its author was an anti-semite, or sadist; a great movie director remains a great director even if she did horrible things in her private life. Very little of our past science and philosophy and arts would still be standing if we were to apply these criteria, and I very strongly doubt we'd gain something better. Every single time "political" criteria have been used to judge the value of intellectual products, it's been the indicator of serious troubles, both for the society doing it and for the overall quality of the disciplines.
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The salient difference is that outages are measurable.
In contrast, "harassment" is an extremely controversial subject that nobody agrees upon, for example, in some legislations, calling a person with XY chromosomes "him" rather than "her" is considered a hate crime, a dramatic change from labelling conventions of just a few years ago. Indeed what constitutes harassment is a major point of contention between different parts of the political spectrum, and a core part of the culture wars.
In addition, harassment is easily lied about. Indeed, what downsides are there for false harassment claims?
If I was a Google competitor, and Machiavellian in moral outlook, I'd feed those flames to weaken Google, and hope that nobody did it to my organisation.
Divide et Impera!
And only a few short decades ago I could fire someone for being gay, or forbid my wife from opening a bank account. And it was a mere century ago that women literally couldn't vote.
I don't see why the fact that social mores change invalidates the social standard we have today.
Furthermore, why do you folk always jump straight to the "b..b..but false harassment!" argument? All it does is demonstrate that you actually don't care at all about the original problem.
Experts place false sexual misconduct allegations at 2-10% (https://qz.com/980766/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations...), and estimate that that number would be even lower if you include all the women who were harassed and never report to start with.
So why are you willing to throw 90-98% of harassed women to the sharks, in order to protect 2-10% of accused men? Plus there's the whole strawman that allegations are always believed. Of course there should be fact checking. In fact, even in the #metoo era, men almost never face repercussions for false allegations (and often not for real ones.)
Your statement that unfounded harassment claims do not lead to repercussions is flat out false. There is no company that would not discipline someone for bringing a harassment claim that was demonstrated to be false.
In short: this argument demonstrates that what you really want to do is only to preserve the status quo and do in fact not give a shit about a major problem in our culture.
The social standards we have today include that false accusations of harassment largely have no repercussions, and amount to a destruction of standards of justice. I don't want to live in a totalitarian society where hate-mobs replace argument, why do you promote one?
I care about the original problem, but believe it to be marginal in comparison with the false accusation problem, and the decline of standards of justice.
The article you cite does not provide any evidence of this claim whatsoever, did you even read it?
You seem to think that marginal inconveniences of women (let's not forget that the Google mob was protesting because some guy hit on some woman at a party!), is more important that human rights of men?
> Experts place false sexual misconduct allegations at 2-10% (https://qz.com/980766/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations...), and estimate that that number would be even lower if you include all the women who were harassed and never report to start with.
Those numbers are specifically for rape, not sexual misconduct. I would hope that the false accusation rate for violent felonies is pretty low. Assuming this is still the case with lesser charges or non-criminal behavior is disingenuous.
> what downsides are there for false harassment claims
There are major downsides to making true harassment claims: you get denounced as a liar and a slut. This is the main reason why so many claims went unreported, and the #metoo movement is one of solidarity which makes it possible for people to actually report true claims without ruining their career. Actually deliberately making a false harassment claim is potentially career suicide.
(Jacob Wohl thought it would be easy to bribe people into making false harassment claims, and this blew up in his face: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/robert-mue... )
How is that a "major downside"? I've been called both, and I can't say I care. I can imagine that loosing a job to a false accusation is a "major downside".
Isn't that the movement whose leader Asia Argento has been has been accused by the New York Times as a sexual harasser [1, 2]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_Argento#Alleged_sexual_as...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/19/us/asia-argento-assault-j...
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> Indeed, what downsides are there for false harassment claims?
Many people who get harassed opt to change teams, companies, or professions rather than actually pursue a formal complaint against their harasser. Perhaps they are mistaken (I don't think so), but they seem to believe that there are real downsides to filing even true harassment claims, to the extent that the aforementioned career upheavals seem easier.
> Perhaps they are mistaken, but they seem to believe that there are real downsides to filing even true harassment claims
Why can’t both be true?
For what you are implying to make any sense you have to assume some sort of equivalence:
1) Between the kind of woman who makes a false claim and the kind of woman who makes a true one.
AND
2) Between the kind of man who is guilty and the kind of man who is falsely accused.
I don’t think either of these two claims holds any water.
Even if you believe that, why shouldn’t there be a process to investigate the claims? You think all harassment claims should be automatically dismissed as false instead?
No, of course not. Symmetrically, the should also not automatically accepted as true.
There should be an objective, measurable process. Given the cul-de-sac that organisations like Google have been strong-armed into, I think the obvious next step is
(1) to record all work-time interaction of all employees and store them for a long time, e.g. at least 10 years.
(2) Give a absolutely clear-cut criteria as to what counts as acceptable behaviour and what doesn't.
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> Even if you believe that, why shouldn’t there be a process to investigate the claims?
Because it quickly becomes a witch-hunt.
It is hard enough to have a fair investigation within a proper court system and legal framework - it’s far more likely any Google process will end up as a kangaroo court than the process leading to any justice.
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You do a chromosomal analysis on everyone before you use a gendered pronoun to describe them? Because you can't tell what their chromosomes are just by appearance.
I can have an educated guess from just a brief glance -- especially if the other person doesn't actively tries to mislead me on such an important issue.
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