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Chinese Ad Resellers On Anti-Google Hunger Strike
itwbennett writes "About 200 employees from 7 Chinese ad reselling companies are protesting outside Google's offices in Shanghai in response to Google terminating their contracts, said Fan Meiyong, a representative for the group. 40 of those have gone on a hunger strike that will last until the group's grievances are resolved, Fan added. The ad resellers have said they have held talks with Google about the matter but they still don't know why the contracts were terminated. The group has even written an open letter to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, asking them for their intervention."
Man those chinese are desperate. This isn't a prison, Google isn't responsible for your personal well-being under any international treaty, convention, or agreement
and I don't think Larry and Sergey will give to damn to those Chinese resellers.
If Google violated a contract, take them to court. If not, then there is no room for complaint.
Oh sure there is, the court of public opinion doesn't follow the same rules as a court of law.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The "search engine optimization" community is waking up to the fact that Google "reselling" is over. The October 27th merger of "Google Places" into Google web search wasn't about "places". It was about "businesses". Google is pulling third-party revenue in-house. Google is squeezing out "made for AdWords" sites, "directories", and other intermediaries that are just forwarding clicks. Search for "London hotels" or "DVD player", and notice how far down you have to go to see an organic search result. If you want to advertise a product that's found by search, you now talk to Google directly.
This will put a big dent in the "search engine optimization" industry. We'll see many junk sites going under, too.
Bing, having copied Google in this within days, is doing roughly the same thing.
The guys in China are getting hit by this, but they're just collateral damage of a major policy change.
Anyone willing to bet they're being paid by Baidu, or even better Beijing? Those on the hunger strike probably get a nice bump. Or maybe they're just using the only chance they'll get to protest in public. If this was a Chinese company they were protesting against, there would be 200 freshly dug graves.
They worked for google, they got money from google.
Google got somebody else to do the work (themselves), google stopped paying a workforce no longer needed.
Omfgod google is evul for not paying workforce to do nothing! Workforce doing nothing really hard! Google entitled to pay workforce doing nothing!
No seriously, you're trying to make it sound like they are entitled to something beyond their contracts. While it really suck to lose your job and I can imagine it sucking even more in China, the reality of a normal job is that you're only entitled to a paycheck for as long as you work and you're only entitled to work for as long as you're needed.
If their contracts say something else, then google is doing something illegal in the scope of the contracts. If not, you don't really have a case.
Sure. Great point and quite interesting. The problem is that it doesn't apply here.
Google did not employ these people. These were companies that Google stopped doing business with. As long as Google didn't have some long term binding contract that ceasing business violates they are not 'legally' responsible for the employees that these companies can no longer afford to pay because they don't have Google's business.
This article doesn't go into detail but I believe, even in China, it is OK to cease employment if your company goes under which is exactly what is going to happen to these companies since their business model was so flawed as to depend on a sole customer anyway. Whether the "in China" factor means that there are more severe ramifications for the terrible CEOs that run these organizations is another matter.