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?

[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?

[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: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

[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.