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Department of Labor Sues Google Over Compensation Data (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNNMoney: The Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Google on Wednesday to get the Internet company to turn over compensation data on its employees. The data request is part of a routine audit into Google's equal opportunity hiring practices, which is required because of the company's role as a federal contractor. Google provides cloud computing services to various federal agencies and the military. Google is obligated to let the government access records that show its hiring doesn't discriminate based on race, religion, sexual orientation, gender and more. According to the lawsuit, Google has repeatedly refused to provide names, contact information, job history and salary history details that the government has requested for its employees. The Labor Department is now requesting that a judge order all of Google's federal contracts canceled unless it complies with the data request. "Despite many opportunities to produce this information voluntarily, Google has refused to do so," Thomas M. Dowd, acting director for the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, said in a statement. "We filed this lawsuit so we can obtain the information we need to complete our evaluation."
Do no evil.
Google is obligated to let the government access records that show its hiring doesn't discriminate based on race, religion, sexual orientation, gender and more.
Missed two biggies:
Age.
National origin.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Can't they?
Google, the company running the most all-pervasive surveillance system in all of human history, is fighting to protect their own privacy?
Not that I needed another belly laugh, after the last election, but dude, that's funny.
Remember when the Obama administration summoned the CEOs of the big 5 banks to Washington and they didn't show up? That must've stung, no? Well, now Google's trying the same thing with big gubbermint. Can't wait to see what happens. I can smell the testosterone from the other side of the border!
Google has Ph.D engineers working on a solution to the problem of delivering accurate employee compensation records.
I do not understand why google has not complied. I get it if they do not like the request, I wouldn't like it either, but they signed for those contracts and agreed to these terms so they could get paid.
Quite frankly at a certain point an example needs to be made.
I see this kind of disregard for the law and for contracts etc and it's getting much worse. We need to publicly kill a large corporation, and we need to do it in a very messy painful way. We need to do this to bring the others into line.
Sun Tsu's art of war dictates that a general must publicly execute one of his men so the others fall in line. We need to kill sony for infecting multiple countries with rootkits, or subway for poisoning our population, or walmart for actively encouraging child slave labor, or google for failing to comply with legal contractual obligations.
One must die that we may all live, this is the way of the harvest and we know it, now we just have to pick one to kill by revoking their corporate charter and disassembling their physical business structures.
How big an ego do you need to have to completely ignore the law? They knew about this when they became a federal contractor, if they don't want to provide this... can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Did Google think they are now above the law? Perhaps they were, had Clinton won the election.
The alternate explanation is complete gross incompetence in Google's HR department, they did not even have the information even if they wanted. But would you believe that from the largest surveillance and data analysis company in the world?
Oh you poor, stupid bastard. Did you have a lot of SCO stocks?
I think it is utterly ridiculous for the government to force companies to keep track of race, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity. That is personal information that is neither the employer's business nor the federal government's.
People should either refuse to answer such questions or simply make up answers.
Would have been nice to sweep that one under the rug.
I wonder what other contracts the government has with Google...
This lawsuit lists only one, the GSA's "Advertising and Integrated Marketing Solutions Contract", number GS07F227BA. Since it gives a contract number, we can actually reference it on a few different websites. I guess we can use the FPDS website to search for more contracts awarded to Google. ...
There's a million dollar contract for Google AdWords for the FDA, $250K awarded by the State Department for marketing its "Programs and Products", A lot of contracts by the BBG (who administers the "Voice of America" program)...Neat stuff!
Granted, I know that Google is the digital nexus of advertising online, but it still just feels a little disappointing how much of our tax money is going directly to them. (I suppose it pails in comparison, though, to other contractors like Lockheed Martin. Doing some more Googling (how ironic) seems to indicate that Google isn't even in the top 100. So I guess it's water under the bridge.
I wonder if I can find any contracts by the NSA...
Yep because the Government Departments that have signed on with Google would love if all those contacts and Google-cloud specific systems were suddenly unavailable. I think this would hurt the Government a lot more than this would hurt Google.
Mainly, because the Government is locked in to some extent now and it would be impossible to decouple.
TFS should have included Google's response (already in TFA):
“We’ve worked hard to comply with the OFCCP’s current audit. However, the handful of OFCCP requests that are the subject of the complaint are overbroad in scope, or reveal confidential data, and we've made this clear to the OFCCP, to no avail. These requests include thousands of employees’ private contact information which we safeguard rigorously. We hope to continue working with OFCCP to resolve this matter.”
The Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Google on Wednesday to get the Internet company to turn over compensation data on its employees. [...] Google is obligated to let the government access records that show its hiring doesn't discriminate based on race, religion, sexual orientation, gender and more.
And how exactly does providing data on employees prove that they do not discriminate against applicants? Oh, that's right, it isn't about equality of opportunity, it's about equality of results. I forgot.
Why is India so poor? They have been exposed to modern technology, current learning and culture has been made available to them. Yet they continue to live in deplorable squalor. Why? I just want to grab Indians by the shoulders and shake them and scream at them WHY! Why won't you fix your country! Why won't you fix it? Can anybody explain it to me? Seriously?
When Trump is in this will get canned,
The Goog feels like admitting that its demographics are as badly skewed as other tech companies would be letting down its supporters.
Can't have the precious snowflakes exposed to the truth now, can we?
Well if the concern is about confidential data, then just wait for the next public leak and the problem will be solved.
If you're over 50 years old and looking for a job at Google , apply now!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
10000 employees know most of their affiliate adwords hits are generated from worthless click farms. 9999 of these same people don't care.
Any rational number divided by count of current Google employees over 40 result in an undefined answer.
28 employees tried to eat parts of android version statues on at least two separate occasions.
89 ran away from the giant honeycomb bee thinking it might sting them.
31415 employees have used wget at least once. Of these 21415 have set an alias in their shells to include --no-check-certificate. 300 type it every time, 200 tried and failed to find a shorter flag, 50 tried unsuccessfully to locate a stash of root certs. Only 3 were aware of the fact using wget constitutes a crime.
While 100 think Google's corporate motto should be "Playing to the edge" the majority of Google employees regret their role in cyber stalking the worlds peeps.
Google in the formative and perhaps current years only hires the best/smartest. Sorry but while there are outliers of all races; when hiring soooo many it's going to pool in the Asian and white category. Forcing them to hire people BECAUSE of their race/religion(religious people tend to have much lower IQs) is why other such companies who are forced to do that are so efficiently run(not).
Reminds me of R & M's Laugh-In, with the snort-chuckle telephone operator, Ernestine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Gotta watch all 3 minutes to see the eerily-spot-on G connection.
We're a government contractor. We get audited. We've NEVER been asked for as much data as they're asking google. This is almost certainly a witch hunt.
Sadly it's not politically wrong due to historical factors. If a government is going to have a policy about racist hiring practices it's going to be entirely useless without keeping track of information about employees races.
It's not a perfect world full of perfect people, and if you want to be able to get a job without having to belong to the correct Church (a problem with an employment agency near me a while back who were rejecting Catholics, Mormons and non-Christians despite taking government money) then some heavy handedness on the behalf of citizens like yourself is needed from time to time.
The very notion of "gender identity" is a delusion, aka a matter for phychiatry.
The very notion of "psychiatry" is a delusion, aka a matter for Xenu.
-- Tom Cruz, posting on behalf of Scientology
To know whether they discriminate or not, you have to know the demographics of their candidate pool.
If say 20% women are applying (for a position type), and the women's qualification levels are equivalent statistically to men's, and roughly 20% women are getting hired that's not discrimination. Same goes with race.
If there are barriers to getting to the candidate pool with equivalent qualifications and experience, that's a problem earlier in the chain and in the nature of educational opportunity equality and barriers, economic barriers, social barriers etc. All of that is not Google's fault, if it's the case.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I'm pretty sure Google lawyers know the contract terms don't require that level of personally-identifiable exposure of sensitive employee data. https://youtu.be/PXg5tgMdcXU
I don't really understand this. If you sue someone for breach of contract usually you just get monetary damages so there seems an obvious risk here that the court will say that Google is in breach, but the government department hasn't suffered any real loss, so Google should pay $1. It would be better for the government department just not to pay Google until they've received all the data they feel entitled to by the contract and let Google sue if it wants to. But obviously I'm not familiar with all the ways that US law is broken. It seems that in the US things are handled by courts which in all sane jurisdictions would never get anywhere near a court.
> show its hiring doesn't discriminate based on race, religion, sexual orientation, gender and more.
IQ is dependent on the genetics of various human races. Therefore Google needs to discriminate baseed on genes, just to avoid hiring the dumb.
Ashkenazi Jew, hindi = highest IQ, often genius level
Yellow Asians, WASP = high IQ, highly motivated
mediterranan whites, e.g. italians = average IQ further hurt by laziness
blacks = low IQ (70 or less), but often high motivation (US military holds them higher than hispanics)
hispanics and arabs = low IQ but even lower motivation (Army and Marines detest them as useless)
Going after the company is not an application of that idea, an application of Roman decimation or any equivalent concept of punishing someone pour encourager les autres. You want to make sphincters pucker here? Real simple. Hold the executive(s) responsible personally. Pierce the corporate veil and go after them directly for ordering non-compliance.
Google doesn't want to give up data, how ironic that a company built and mostly profiting on other people's data won't give up it's own even when required. What we need is a rebellion against Google.
Since the government has filed a lawsuit asking a court to invalidate all federal contracts held by Google, Google is now free to give the government exactly what it wants by immediately terminating all cloud services provided to the federal government, without warning.
That's the thing about lawsuits like this - once a plaintiff asks a court for relief, the defendant is free to give that relief even without the court's final ruling. Google can just turn the switch off and leave the government high and dry, and that is exactly what it should do.
It is a violation of the 5th Amendment to force someone to turn over testimonial evidence that could be used against them in a legal case.
This article is incredibly one-sided and the quote from google isn't very detailed. What is the DoL looking for that google considers so overly broad? What about the contracts are they asserting should be kept private? Maybe google's argument is perfectly reasonable and the DoL's request isn't. Hard to tell with only one side of the argument.
Go read the law. It's not in the law. It's overreach.
It is easy to assume that if x% of the population is in class A, that x% of hires should be in that class. However that makes the assumption that members of all classes (A, B, C...) (to give an example, of all races) have the same qualifications. There is no reason to believe this is true among people showing up to be considered for jobs there. To give a simple example, how many math majors or engineering majors are female? When I went through that number was very small. One might ask whether peer pressures keep some groups from following certain courses. And so on into the night. Google is not responsible for these pressures or effects, yet they can lead to large differences in group composition of their applicant pool. There may also be genetic components that affect how people select courses of study. We can't make 2 automobiles identical to one another; how then can we expect it possible to make 2 people the same? It is pretty clear that whatever differences exist are less than the range of individual variation, but looking at counts alone among employees without considering all the factors that make one person more suited to a job will find, not bias, but conformance to a set of quotas.
Darl, is that you? Still looking from under that cowboy hat for your cattle?
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
If the CEO effectively or directly orders an action that a reasonable person could foresee would lead to the death of their workers or members of the general public, then it most certainly could apply. In fact, a civilized society would not only punish the CEO harshly, but hold the CEO to the strongest standard under noblesse oblige which might merit not only an execution in some cases, but the state liquidating their estate and putting the assets to work for the community and victims (in particular).
This is why I don't trust the government to run things, they conflate social engineering with actually running things. I recall first adopting this view when I heard that despite failing the tests fire departments were being strong armed into hiring more protected classes, especially women. I want the best qualified person doing my rescue from a burning building, not the socially preferred yet inferior one. If the government wants to run things then they need to drop the social engineering and run things efficiently. If they insist on social engineering, and they do, then they won't be able to run things effectively since they are deliberately hiring less qualified people.
Google like most tech firms does a very bad job of hiring minorities except for Asians and does a very bad job of hiring and promoting women.
That info does not belong to the government, and the government is NOT we the people.
Sorry. We are out of white people application's.
Not a chance. Google spends plenty greasing congressional palms. That's what really matters; that is how corporations make their will into reality.
FFS - Rosa Parks did not get to negotiate a contract where one of the terms was sitting at the back of the bus.
Please act like a human being and not like an eliza bot.