
Google under investigation for ‘Thanksgiving Four’ firings, discouraging unions - SirLJ
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/09/google-under-investigation-from-nlrb.html
======
CoolGuySteve
Google has already been convicted in a wage fixing scheme with other Silicon
Valley firms. They wouldn’t even interview me when I was trying to leave
Apple. I made a cool $3k from the settlement.

Guys, hey guys, I’m starting to think the “Don’t be evil” thing has always
been bullshit, at least when it comes to workers rights.

~~~
estomagordo
Wait, what, you received a damages payment because a company wouldn't
interview you?

~~~
ceejayoz
Because a company _illegally colluded with their competitors not to interview_
them.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-
settlement/a...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-
settlement/apple-google-intel-adobe-to-pay-325-million-to-settle-hiring-
lawsuit-idUSBREA4M0MY20140523)

~~~
twinge
Interviews were allowed, but recruiters weren't allowed to make the initial
contact with employees.

~~~
ceejayoz
Given the high level attention involved - direct emails between Steve Jobs and
Eric Schmidt - I'd fully expect that policy to bleed over into "don't
interview/hire" to avoid any _appearance_ of having recruited them.

------
baud147258
Interesting how the article gloss over the fact that, according to Google, the
four fired employees were actually stalking other Google employees to check if
they were working on projects they didn’t like – namely, an in-development
cloud services for US border cops. Now that the politics are getting involved,
it will get worse before it gets any better.

~~~
advisedwang
I think you forgot to say "According to Google". Of course Google says they
did nothing wrong.

~~~
baud147258
True. I added that to my comment, thank you.

------
mrobot
We need a tech worker's union. And technology around communication and setting
up strikes etc.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
No we don’t. We are probably the most privileged workers in the world. If we
are mistreated, we can quit and get another job down the street, likely with a
raise. It’s not worth trading for all the bullshit that comes along with
unions.

~~~
commandlinefan
Doctors, lawyers and actors all have unions, and their ranks include higher
paid, more privileged workers than most tech folks could dream of.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
SAG doesn’t exist for the movie stars. It’s for the nobodies and the up-and-
comers to avoid getting screwed by excessive unpaid work for “exposure” or who
get squeezed into long term contracts before they have star power.

I’d like to see stats on union participation among doctors and lawyers. I’d
bet it’s vanishingly small, especially for lawyers.

~~~
gamblor956
SAG protections also benefit movie stars. It was created by a group of stars
to challenge the enormous commercial leverage of the studios back in the
"studio system" era of Hollywood.

Stars have surprisingly little leverage against studios. Only a few actors can
consistently sell a movie regardless of quality--currently, only Dwayne
Johnson and Tom Cruise. When stars have leverage in negotiations, it's
generally because _other_ putative participants (usually investors or
producers) have hinged their participation on the participation of one or more
specific actors.

 _I’d like to see stats on union participation among doctors and lawyers. I’d
bet it’s vanishingly small, especially for lawyers._

Almost all public sector lawyers belong to a union. This includes those
working for the county, state, and federal governments in a legal capacity, as
well as those working at most major cities.

The same is generally true of doctors working for the public sector. Notably,
in contrast to the legal field, there are a number of doctors unions for
doctors employed by private sector employers.

------
raxxorrax
They will probably get an extremely high and disproportionate severance
package as is American tradition. But nobody even similar will ever get hired
again. Instead Google probably will just pay consultants on how to keep
employees in line without them noticing. Perhaps internal data sharing will
also be restricted more.

------
whb07
It is astonishing the continuous attempts by the highest paid workers, in one
of the most well-known companies in the world, to keep trying to bring down
the "system". The only thing i can think of is "bite the hand that feeds you".

Do the extremely "woke" crowd working in such high tech companies know what
could happen to their salaries and perks if they are to be part of a highly
regulated industry, or they haven't thought about the second/third order
effects yet?

Do these supporters know that they can go work at other places that don't pay
$200k+, so that they too can go live like the regular people?

I'm pretty sure that there are N number of refugee camps that could use a
basic application built to keep track of refugees. But of course, that doesn't
come with 3 chef prepared meals per day and dry cleaning in house.

------
seibelj
I’m pretty sure a union shop vote of software engineers would be defeated
80/20 but it would be fun to see someone at google try. These organizers live
in fantasy land!

~~~
advisedwang
That's true, although I suspect if Google keeps firing people on trumped-up
accusations whenever they criticize management, more people may feel they want
an organization set up to defend them.

~~~
xibalba
> trumped-up accusations

So are you alleging that this...

> We dismissed four individuals who were engaged in intentional and often
> repeated violations of our longstanding data security policies, including
> systematically accessing and disseminating other employees’ materials and
> work...

...is trumped-up? I have not seen any articles which dispute that these fired
employees were basically tracking other employees work activities.

------
kevmo
They'll get hit with some small monetary penalty.

Nothing is going to change until we replace our anti-worker government with
pro-worker government.

~~~
luxuryballs
Why should they get a penalty at all? We want things like freedom of speech
but not freedom of who we allow inside our private lives?

~~~
shantly
... uh, what?

------
sigzero
I don't see Google losing.

------
m0zg
Now that Sundar "McKinsey" Pichai runs the whole thing, you can expect much
more of this, irrespective of the outcome of this investigation. In fact, it
looks like you can expect more of this at all top tech firms. Just the other
day Bezos came out with his "screw the activist employees" thing. Nadella (and
MS in general) never really had any sympathy for activist employees in the
first place (although they're going full bore on "diversity", openly and
unabashedly discriminating against men in their hiring). I also never head any
stories of glorious activism from Netflix. That leaves Facebook. I'm pretty
sure Zuck is tired of this bullshit as well.

------
BickNowstrom
That's two cases where politicians jumped the gun to make something that isn't
decided yet a decisive campaign issue:

\- Elizabeth Warren Ramps Up Attacks on Apple Card Bias Claims

\- The four got public support from presidential front-runners Sens. Bernie
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who took to Twitter to bash Google for alleged
“anti-union” actions.

What if this turns out to go out with a whimper? The Apple Card bias was
something unrelated to gender that got blown up by someone popular, and these
firings were carefully vetted and are legally justified?

Will these politicians apologize for jumping the gun? I bet they will point
out they were the first when it turns out any other way...

~~~
kevingadd
The Apple Card bias is a real problem. Who cares whether it's about gender or
not? If it's not about gender, the responsibility lies on the bad actor to
prove otherwise. The most logical conclusion - based on the events that
occurred and the info the general public has - is that it's about gender.

They could have defused the controversy almost immediately by identifying the
actual cause and fixing it. Part of the reason the story blew up was that DHH
and his wife struggled _at length_ to even get an explanation for the problem
or find a human who could fix it. The opacity of that whole machine and its
resistance to correction is why it became a fuss. I honestly don't care
whether it turns out to be about gender, because the _end result_ of that
system is that someone got discriminated against in a way that was
indistinguishable from being gender discrimination. In the same fashion, if
your pricing algorithm accidentally (due to training set bias or whatever) has
a 20% higher chance to overcharge people of color, it doesn't really matter
how it got that way. It's a racist algorithm and that doesn't mean you're a
racist: It just means you have to fix it.

Similarly, if the firings were carefully vetted and legally justified, they
could have done a better job of explaining that rationale to the public. As a
former Google employee the public rationale was obviously deceptive in some
fashion, and undermines any suspicion I might have had regarding the employees
in question. I worked with plenty of people at that company who probably
deserved to be fired, but when the company behaves _that way_ in public and
selects people in a way that coincidentally undermines union organizing, I
know who I'm going to suspect.

~~~
BickNowstrom
> The Apple Card bias is a real problem. Who cares whether it's about gender
> or not? If it's not about gender, the responsibility lies on the bad actor
> to prove otherwise. The most logical conclusion - based on the events that
> occurred and the info the general public has - is that it's about gender.

And I work with credit risk models and can tell you there is a negligible
chance that gender is causing a 20x credit limit increase. No protected
variable will have so much influence, and Apple/GS are not even legally
allowed to directly reference such variables.

It may be the most logical conclusion for the general public, but all they see
is the output of a black box. DHH jumped to conclusions that it had to be
something about gender, with n=1.

Who says there is a problem that needs fixing? Demanding that women and men
always receive equal limits is not about fairness, it is a very radical notion
that makes discriminative credit risk scoring almost impossible.

I am not saying that Apple/GS did not mess up here, and could have been more
transparent, but, in their defense: Oftentimes you can't be more transparent
(like when Google closes an account for posting something illegal, they have
to keep mum, while the user loudly complains online that they got banned for
doing nothing), an help desk person is never going to be able to give an
explanation for a model decision (this is usually a good thing), and DHH
seemed to be barking up the wrong tree all together (what if the different
limits were the result of a, completely legal, influencer program or
randomized trial?).

It really does matter how it got that way. If 20% of people of color vs. white
people have a low income (a non-protected variable), I am perfectly allowed to
use that variable to deny them a loan more often, even if the result is that
20% of people of color don't receive a loan. That's not a racist algorithm,
however it would be racist if I start ignoring income of certain people as to
achieve racial demographic parity in loans.

Similarly, as this is an ongoing investigation now, and they probably
anticipated that, Google was probably legally very limited in what they could
disclose. I bet some people with all the knowledge of the data - and colleague
snooping are shaking their heads at some of the public perception of this case
as union-busting.

The opposite of accepting a coincidence once in a while is viewing everything
through the lens of intentional discrimination.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
> It really does matter how it got that way. If 20% of people of color vs.
> white people have a low income (a non-protected variable), I am perfectly
> allowed to use that variable to deny them a loan more often, even if the
> result is that 20% of people of color don't receive a loan. That's not a
> racist algorithm, however it would be racist if I start ignoring income of
> certain people as to achieve racial demographic parity in loans.

It's not that simple. The principle of "disparate impact" means that you
can't, in general, make the decision in a way that adversely impacts people of
color just because you didn't directly consider race in your decision.

You can use income in your decision because considering income "is necessary
to achieve one or more substantial, legitimate, non-discriminatory interests."
Income is directly related to ability to repay a loan, so you need to consider
it. You can't just use any old variable you want to. You can't deny people for
a loan based on what genre of music they listen to, because that has no
justifiable connection to whether they will repay a loan.

~~~
BickNowstrom
Everything, including income, is eventually correlated with race. The point I
was making counters "does not matter how, just the outcome matters": The model
disapproved you not because you are black, but because you have a low income.
There _is_ societal racism there that needs addressing with policy and
regulation, not by handicapping your model by throwing away non-protected
variables. The -perfectly legal-outcome will be that fewer people of color
receive a loan.

I know that you can't use just any old variable, but I tried enough to know
that music genre would probably be an informative feature (dibs on providing
loans to classical - and Judeo-Christian religious music lovers, you are free
to underwrite the dubstep - and ghetto rap fans).

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Music preferences undoubtedly would be correlated with risk. You still can't
use them because of disparate impact.

To get away with making a decision in a way that has disparate impact, you
need to have a legitimate need to be making the decision that way. In the case
of income, you can justify needing to use it in your decision, because income
is directly connected to ability to repay. In the case of music preferences,
you can't, because there is no direct connection to loan risk.

