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Arnnon Geshuri, Newest Wikimedia Trustee, Forced To Resign
New submitter Mdann52 writes: Following an earlier vote of no confidence, it was announced that the recent appointee, Arnnon Geshuri, had stepped down from the board. This was following community criticism into his background. Says the announcement:
The Board Governance Committee is working to improve and update our
selection processes before we fill the vacancy left by Arnnonâ(TM)s departure.
We are sorry for the distress and confusion this has caused to some in our
community, and also to Arnnon.
For detailed background, see coverage in the Wikipedia Signpost, Wikipedia's community newspaper:
Geshuri steps down from board
Media coverage of the Arnnon Geshuri no-confidence vote
Also check the previous two weeks' News & Notes for how the no-confidence vote came about.
Where are you getting that? From the BBC:
Documents filed with a US court indicated Mr Geshuri, who now works for Tesla Motors, had been involved in enforcing a deal struck between Apple and Google not to poach each other's staff.
In a 2007 email, while he had been working at Google, he had assured his boss, Eric Schmidt, that a company employee would be "terminated within the hour" for approaching an Apple staff member, the documents indicated.
I wish they would have presented that before this, because this makes no sense otherwise:
Nearly 300 backed a vote of no confidence over allegations of involvement in a no-poaching deal while he was a Google human resources boss.
Mr Geshuri was alleged to have fired an employee who violated an agreement by approaching an Apple staff member.
I don't know about you AC, but I would not want somebody working for me that had been involved in that breach of ethics. This guy played a part in keeping IT workers' salaries down because Google and Apple do not want to pay for what their talent is actually worth to them.
And of course, you know what that makes him in my book: a gaslighting asshole manager.
I wish I had mod points. California is pretty strict on both sides of its "right to work" laws, and what Google and Apple did should have resulted in prison sentences for executives at every company involved. Not morally "should have," but legally "should have." They committed serious crimes.
Unfortunately, in California, you can't put rich people in prison, especially if they're also famous.
"Only following orders" can sometimes be a valid excuse.
Maybe. But that is not the case here.
Arnnonâ(TM) Geshuri was no flunky. He was an executive in charge of 900 recruiters. It was his job to know the law, and more importantly, it was his job to tell Eric Schmidt (or anyone else) "this is illegal and we shouldn't be doing it".
Geshuri did not create the no-hire policy that was agreed upon by Google, Apple and the other Silicon Valley companies. He was just an HR guy who followed his company's policies
Which is no excuse for breaking the law. As an HR guy he should not have been following illegal policies.
He wasn't just "an HR guy". He was the HR guy. He was in charge of recruiters. At his level, he was well aware that the policies he was implementing were utterly illegal.
Don't try to make it sound like he just worked in the HR department handing out benefit information to new hires.
You are welcome on my lawn.
1. Somebody does something that's actually quite minor.
Well, no. He actually did something that was pretty major, affecting tens or even hundreds of thousands of workers.
What's actually going on here is that he was a big-time human resources manager, but it turns out that many of those human resources don't like they way they were managed. Also, they just plain object to someone that demonstrably unethical being appointed to the Wikimedia board.