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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."
Yes, and I am saying that those terms are the kinds of terms a fascist government would impose; they are morally wrong.
Gender. Not gender identity.
The very notion of "gender identity" is a delusion, aka a matter for phychiatry. The government has no business tracking those, other than as generic mental health data. If you want to change your gender, get an operation, changing labels doesn't do jack. (Ok, a 100% gender swap operation still won't let you into a North Carolina bathroom).
As for discrimination by race or gender, in current cutthroat capitalist world it's best to remove all quotas and inequality that the Department of Labor and other agencies force upon companies while spewing platitudes about removing inequality. The only fair way is complete race and gender blindness. In the absence of regulations, a sane company will win by making relative differences of compensation to their employees exactly same as their differences in merit. If a three-headed worker can do 1.5 times as much work as a two-headed one, the fair pay is 1.5 times as much. Now assume that, per the "gender pay gap" myth a woman is paid 75% the pay for the same work -- so here's a brilliant idea: employ no one but women! Pay them 5% above what the competition would so you get to pick your employees -- you get to pocket 20% pure savings!
There are two facts to consider: 1. variance between individuals trumps any racial or gender "bonuses" to skill, thus by discriminating against a group you lose a part of qualified individuals, choosing from a smaller talent pool is likely to give worse results. And applicants already largely self-select so savings by reducing recruitment costs are about none; 2. there is a difference between groups. For example, gender: it was beneficial for men to take risks to hunt down than mammoth while losing a fertile woman would badly hurt your group's long-time survival. Men and women have their distinct strengths -- while a particular woman, thanks to individual variance, may be a good lumberjack, women on the average are massively less competent at lumberjacking (especially with an axe rather than a chainsaw), while a typical man makes a worthless kindergarten teacher. Race differences also have an evolutionary base: in some places, you win by being able to run/etc faster, while in others it's more important to be able to plan to survive winter. Real race differences are really miniscule compared to those of gender -- for the former, there's a mere couple ten thousand years of divergence. Today, race is almost exclusively a proxy for culture, and it's the latter what causes the massive difference in achievements you can observe.
The conclusion: 1. any selection that's not 100% race/gender/etc-blind hurts not only the discriminee but also the side doing the selection, 2. a fair selection will produce unequal (claimed by some to be "unfair") averages.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.