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Former Google Employee Files Lawsuit Alleging the Company Fired Him Over Pro-Diversity Posts (theverge.com)
According to court documents filed today, a former Google engineer is suing the company for discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wrongful termination. "Tim Chevalier, a software developer and former site-reliability engineer at Google, claims that Google fired him when he responded with internal posts and memes to racist and sexist encounters within the company and the general response to the now-infamous James Damore memo," reports The Verge. From the report: Chevalier said in a statement to The Verge, "It is a cruel irony that Google attempted to justify firing me by claiming that my social networking posts showed bias against my harassers." Chevalier, who is also disabled and transgender, alleges that his internal posts that defended women of color and marginalized people led directly to his termination in November 2017. He had worked at Google for a little under two years. Notably, Chevalier's posts had been quoted in Damore's lawsuit against Google -- in which Damore sued the company for discrimination against conservative white men -- as evidence Google permitted liberals to speak out at the company unpunished. Chevalier's lawsuit alleges that his firing is, in fact, a form of punishment. The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco County Superior Court and Chevalier is seeking damages for lost wages, emotional distress, punitive damages, and injunctive relief against those alleged harmful acts. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Regardless of you gender, race, beliefs, whatever, there are some unspoken but very obvious rules about what you say and don't say on company time. Especially in written form. But apparently some people didn't get the memo..
Do they do any real work at Google anymore or just write weird memos about social justice all day?
In my opinion, if you are openly contributing to a toxic work environment, you deserve to be fired.
This applies to conservatives or this person.
I think the main issue here is that Google doesn't want people arguing this stuff on company time instead of working. Fighting against social ills like sexism and discrimination is a noble cause, but if employees are spending half their time doing so instead of working, the company will suffer.
Better to rid of toxic people on both sides than to allow them to rile up others and cause big social problems within the company. A lot of times a group of people will work quite well as a team until politics is brought up, then it's practically World War Three.
Just quickly post some things like these. Not saying this is what happened here, but seems to be a flaw in the system.
It is also quite possible the actual problem here is these companies having styled themselves too much as a "home" and "welcoming place" in order to attract talented people (and have them work long hours uncompensated) and people working there are less and less aware that it is a place of work. You know, one of those places were you keep politics out and are expected to behave professionally all the time ...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
FTFA:
"A Google employee allegedly responded to the post by noting that asking for ID was just part of the job, Gizmodo reported. Chevalier then made a privilege-denying dude meme using Google’s internal meme generator with the caption, “I have opinions about forms of oppression that don’t affect me.” "
Google has an internal meme generator. I'm sure it provides hours of laughter and cohesive working.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
this is getting magnified by two thing:
a). It's click bait. I predict 300+ comments on this post if not more.
b). These lawsuits are being funded by the Republican party. This is a major political issue for the Republican party. It's part of a larger narrative they're building that white males are under assault.
Now, the fact is white males are... by declining wages due to outsourcing, H1-Bs, economic crashes caused by widespread deregulation, vulture capital firms killing off their jobs, etc, etc); but they're no more so than any other member of the working class. It's basically the right wing version of identity politics. Something to distract from the broader issues and keep the various groups of working class people at each other's throats. A caste system.
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This is just the opposite end of the spectrum from James Damore.
Maybe if you're looking at it as the irrational bigotry in this chick's rants being the polar opposite of the kind of rational, nuanced case put forward by Danmore. But if you're talking about politics and particular stances, then no, there's no "opposite spectrum" to a centrist.
I'm constantly being harassed because I'm a transgendered lesbian person of no-color - although I identify as Asian. People just assume that because I look like a white man and act like a heterosexual man, that I'm white heterosexual guy. When I tell them that my wife is a transgendered homosexual man of no-color but identifies as Black and that I'm in a non-traditional marriage, folks don't take me seriously. I get thrown out of LGBTQ groups and made fun of. Just because she has a vagina and breasts and can get pregnant doesn't mean he is a woman. And just because I can get erections doesn't mean I'm a man.
People really need to stop this bigotry.
I'll bite. Where did you get those numbers from?
Not saying you're right, not saying you're wrong. Just looking for source data.
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One might think the unwanted attention from outsider interlopers has forced Google's hand and they're quietly trying to clean house. Then again, one George Wallace and one Bull Connor and for two generations most of America has been assuming automatically all white Southerners are racist to the bone. So maybe Google doesn't get out from under this one for a good long while either.
The only reason why they ever created the term "cisgender" is because they simply cannot bring themselves to call it what it really is: normal.
Admitting this through word choice would remove much of the wind from their proverbial sails.
Any large organization falls apart if professionalism isn't maintained to some degree (see current White House). Groups of people don't work together well with lots of emotional outbursts from its members. This is pretty consistent across most cultures. If somebody can't keep their shit together at work, then they gotta go. It's as simple as that.
I don't respond to AC's.
Gotta have adult supervision. A culture that eschews adult supervision isn't going to work out in the end. Whether it's petty incivility and unprofessional behavior in the workplace or millions of investor dollars wasted on juice squeezers and raw water...it'll correct itself eventually.
On the contrary, I think it will strengthen Damore's case, because Google has tacitly agreed that there has been unacceptable behavior from the so-called "diversity" camp. In which case, firing Damore shows even less justifiable bias against his position.
Anonymous for obvious reasons.
I reported Tim to HR several times. Good to see that the system works.
Tim posted a lot. A lot. Pretty much all of was abuse.
I never saw any good faith pro diversity posts from him, so the article is wrong in that regard.
Instead, his usual posting style consists of jumping into a discussion and start hurling serious abuse and personal attacks against whomever he thought was in the wrong.
He regularly calls other work colleagues Nazi, Racist, Rapist. Relentlessly and over and over.
He is very toxic and abusive. Shame it took this long to get rid of him.
I don't think his lawyers really know what kind of stuff Tim was writing when at Google. If they did they would know that this whole "fired for being pro diversity" angle will crash and burn almost immediately once Google starts showing what really happened.
Inventing new words is fine (stupid, but fine). It's when they unilaterally redefine old words to mean something completely different than they have for centuries that gets annoying.
Since the dawn of humanity "What sex/gender are you?" has meant "Do or don't you have a dick/Y-chromosome?", not "Which of two (or several dozen) sets of perceived societal stereotypes do you and/or your 'headmates' feel most in conformance with today?".
I don't fucking care, I just want to know if you have a vagina or not. Though if you're having problems answering that question chances are I'm not interested one way or the other anyway.
yes, he was born with a vagina.
You have an issue with that, it's your problem, not his.
I'm pretty sure that her being born with a vagina and then developing the belief that she's a man is an issue for her, and nobody else. It certainly isn't an issue for the court to examine, so wtf is it doing as part of the lawsuit?
It was Google who created the toxic work environment. The company allowed and even encouraged political activism. But Google chose one side to support and fired anyone who didn't agree with their political platform. Goggle might as well introduce religion into the work environment and chose only one denomination to support and fire anyone who doesn't agree.
I wonder how low Google has set the bar when evaluating and hiring employees in order to meet their diversity quotas? Oh and in the real world who gives a flying fuck bout diversity in the workplace? The only real concern is obtaining the job you want. After you are hired you may be able to spend a few minutes worrying about the inequities in life.
It's at-will employment.
"At-will" means you can be fired for ALMOST any reason, or for no reason. But even with "at-will" there is are reasons that cannot be used to fire someone. For instance, you cannot fire someone for belonging to a protected class. California has state restrictions in addition to the federal restrictions. The city of Mountain View may add even more.
How the hell do you "identify" as disabled. You either are able-bodied or you aren't.
There can be literally hundreds of objective measures of physical performance that can screen for physical infirmity. Some of them are even codified into laws and regulations, like what criteria you have to meet to get a handicap placard for your car or whether you're capable of operating a motor vehicle at all.
This phrasing is retarded. And while I'm at it...what the hell is 'queer' exactly?
"Get back to work" and "it's not about your feelings" from a hardcore Leftist. Gosh, funny how things do a complete 180 when it's someone whose points you don't want to listen to.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I'm confused... Do gay people have a different way of speaking? Are transmen inherently different from men? Is this upper-middle class white man having trouble with the appropriate workplace speech of upper-middle class white men?
No it isn't
If it only was an argument. Unfortunately it's mostly a monologue and tons of fallacies on all sides because no rational argument can take place any more. There's been an article on /. about exactly this phenomenon. https://politics.slashdot.org/...
I'd really appreciate it if we could move back towards topics where rational thinking is not overshadowed by identity politics. But I also believe that hoping for this is a very naive thing.
Gender was a linguistic category (e.g., masc, fem, neut, common) until just a few years ago when some bozos thought 'twas cooler than the word "sex".
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
The difficulty is that you can fire someone for no reason, but they may be able to sue for wrongful dismissal if there is an underlying reason that you don't tell them.
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As near as I can tell, this is probably a direct result of Damore's lawsuit. That is, Google almost certainly had a third-party firm come in and independently evaluate every point of Damore's lawsuit. The firm then would have determined the relative likelihood of any of Damore's claims standing up in court. If Tim's postings were toxic enough, and especially if he had been reported to H.R. in the past and H.R. had a notable bias where straight white dudes were punished but non-cis / non-white / etc. people got a pass, then that would have been a major point where the independent firm would have stepped up and said "Yeah you suckers are gonna get railed, there's an overt bias here and that's not going to go over well in court, and we explicitly recommend terminating the worst offenders to reduce future liability". And then Tim gets canned and starts crying, because his expectation up to that point was that he had special privileges and he's not adjusting well to ACTUALLY being treated equally. I'm basing this off of having had to pressure my own work H.R. to call in an independent firm because they were letting a manager get away with overt retaliation against me, and they refused to admit there was a problem until the independent firm said "Yeah, no, there was definitely retaliation, and probably a hostile work environment because of the upper management condoning this behavior as well". Suddenly, the senior legal team was VERY interested and suddenly everyone was very concerned about employees being treated fairly.