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."

Comments

Hunger Strike?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Hunger Strike?

[MichaelSmith]

In china you can hire professional mourners for funerals, so I wonder if you can hire professional hunger strikers.

Re:Hunger Strike?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

I dunno, but it sure appears weird from thousands of miles away. I know it's an off the wall theory, but could it actually be motivated by the government as a way to marginalize the idea of a hunger strike as a meaningful protest so that actual political dissidents who go on hunger strikes might be more easily brushed off?

Re:Hunger Strike?

[Fluffeh]

Man those chinese are desperate.

Yes, they probably are. If you were sacked and not given a reason, you would probably be asking questions. These folks didn't start the hunger strike the moment they got shitcanned. They tried to find out what happened, how to resolve it and the like. This is the only thing they can think of doing - for better or worse.

I don't know the background of this at all, they could have been doing shonky business practice and got caught out once too many by Google or perhaps Google thought they could make more money by simply getting their own folks to do the work, or a million other possible scenarios.

Or perhaps they are simply that desperate to have a job to be able to support their families/put food on their own table that they do not see any other option but to get all the media attention that they can by sitting outside the office of the big "foreign company" starving.

Google ISN'T responsible for their personal well being, I totally agree, but that probably isn't a consolation for them.

Re:Hunger Strike?

[StikyPad]

Hunger strikes don't need marginalizing; they're the grown-up version of holding one's breath.

Re:Hunger Strike?

[FatdogHaiku]

In china you can hire professional mourners for funerals, so I wonder if you can hire professional hunger strikers.

Sure you can, but try to avoid the ones with the "Will Hunger Strike For Food" signs...

Re:Hunger Strike?

[__aajfby9338]

Cool. I'd like to hire one of them for my next design review at work.

Re:Hunger Strike?

[Locutus]

hunger strikes don't cost anything so anyone can do them.

LoB

Re:Hunger Strike?

[zoogies]

Agree - absurd theory. Just some nutty self-serving individuals. The only reason to even bring this up is an attempt to blindly play on the "big, bad, scary communist government" theme.

The truth is, the PRC is completely clueless about PR (public relations) and will continue to be roundly slaughtered in the court of public opinion because of this.

Re:Hunger Strike?

[Miseph]

Don't be ridiculous, that's a totally legitimate business practice. You're probably just upset because you don't have enough money to put yourself on an even playing field with the big boys... maybe you should try working harder and having some personal accountability. Commie.

Re:Hunger Strike?

[nashv]

Actually, Gandhi made several hunger-strikes, but they all occurred only after he was a hugely popular leader- which meant that the possibility of his death, brought massive pressure over the ruling British Government who would have to deal with anarchic rage riots that could break out in the population.

To protest the Salt tax, he simply marched to the sea and made his own , with about a few hundred other people.

.

Re:Hunger Strike?

[tftp]

If you were sacked and not given a reason, you would probably be asking questions.

If you are a permanent employee in the USA you still can be sacked and not given a reason. If you are a contractor in the USA nobody will even think about giving you a reason. Contractors are specifically employed for temporary, special jobs that are not expected to be needed all the time. This is becoming even more popular in the USA because labor laws put more and more burden on employers for the privilege of employing people.

Those contractors in China are likely disappointed, but that's the nature of their job. In the USA contractors are supposed to work for several companies, own the tools, etc.

Google's China strategy has always been a mess

[microbee]

and I don't think Larry and Sergey will give to damn to those Chinese resellers.

Protests? In CHINA?!

[countSudoku()]

Get out the Google Tanks! Oops, wrong regime. Get out the Google StreetView data collection vehicles! If they're not jumping from the building yet, then things are pretty good in Shanghai. Damn, I love me some Shanghai tiles...

Pointless

[Sponge Bath]

If Google violated a contract, take them to court. If not, then there is no room for complaint.

Re:Pointless

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

initial thought

[jnpcl]

(just a guess): the ad resellers were caught adding malware to the ads.

Re:And that'll work out so well for them.

[MightyMartian]

It's a simple answer. We'll just alter Google Maps to show Shanghai in the middle of the China Sea, and then *blub*, that will be the end of that.

Google "reselling" is over

[Animats]

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.

Newsflash

[Vinegar Joe]

Chinese labor laws are not the same as those in the US or Europe.

http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/01/terminating_your_china_employe.html

Re:Newsflash

[Anonymous Coward]

The article says that google didn't terminate a contract with the employees, but with the resellers that were employing them. It effectively put them out of work, but the protesters were never actually employed by google.

Re:Newsflash

[Korveck]

The hunger strikers are not Google employees. Labor laws would not apply to them. Their companies had contracts with Google. As far as I can tell, Google terminated the contracts lawfully. Google owes them nothing, but they are likely betting on generating some public pressure to force Google to "compensate" their "loss".

Re:Newsflash

[vlueboy]

Your link discussed China's* sobering anti-layoff laws that make USA's at-will employment look like the joke it really is.

So looking beyond "ad resellers" and Google to the whole outsourcing deal, it's hard to see how laws against US companies layoffs are a problem today. It's here in the US that they can and have been aggressively shrinking forces, and over in Asia where they are growing, so it will be several years before they even think of shrinking, if US outsourcing doubiously ever reverses its growth.

Further, though there are tons of plants manufacturing and assembling stuff there, I thought they were Chinese-owned, so we won't be the ones doing the firing and the point is moot. For the giants who DO see a danger in Chinese land, they'll just do the sensible thing and open India centers like the rest of the world has been doing recently. I reckon India only seems to be used for coding and English-language phone support, so I've no idea about their manufacturing power.

But that's not our problem. The outsourcing will continue wherever it is linguistically and politically easier. Under recent signs of US prosperity, forced accretion has been obversed in US branches while headcounts rise in Asian branches. More power is going to India, Australia and the Philippines because it makes perfect sense to beancounters to avoid promoting American labor again, in spite of what that means to us here.

*Europe too, without additional detail.

Re:Newsflash

[Matheus]

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.

Re:Newsflash

[xnpu]

Please note though that Chinese courts have a history of showing "fairness", where the definition of fair is probably different from yours.

E.g. if my truck driver drives off a cliff while delivering the goods you ordered to you, you usually can't sue me for the loss of the goods. Instead you're likely to be asked to share in the total costs of the truck, the goods and damages to the drivers family. The fact that you did not directly employ the driver nor owned the truck does not matter. To the court, that's just meaningless paperwork. The driver and the truck were doing a job for you.

Re:Newsflash

[vlueboy]

Why do you believe you have the right to be overpaid for a job? Or that it's more moral to hire an American than someone in China? Simple racism?

It seems that my post just flew by and got tl;dr by some, so read my post to find what I really said.

Compare jobs with software: OpenOffice was in good hands, and the Oracle's ownership apparently killed it. Most people will take something produced by the original crew than the "new" our outsourced ones. Tech support quality loss is a prime example of that.

With the lost jobs that up and left the coutry, people can't just "

Do something that can only be done locally, or do something better than those who can work cheaper.

" is not how a country gets out of 10% unemployment, especially with expert economist forecasts asking to just wait it out another 2 years. A jobless someone with 20 years of management experience and 0 years as nurse has no way to compete with someone at a hospital who spent the same 20 years in their "hard to outsource field," and an oblig. established network of professionals with a foot in the door to resort to, to boot.

People can't switch fields in a heartbeat, like the US or any nation can't shift away from doing what it's best known for in just a few days or weeks to a more profitable venue. You're affected by the recession too, no matter your location, and my [and yours, presumably] IT job exodus plan is miles away from that "currently hard to outsource" nursing job in my prior example. Please be more sensitive.

Re:Honest question

[__aajfby9338]

Whatever they are, I bet they get first class seating on the B-Ark.

Re:American companies do this shit all the time...

[Lazareth]

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.