> So as long as you have good intentions you should be free to bring whatever politics to work?
(IANAL.) Gender discrimination, and sexual harassment in the workplace are against the law in California. I believe the law also protects against retaliation for claims of violations of these things. This is hardly "bringing politics to work".
It's bringing politics to work if you aren't blowing the whistle on illegal behaviour.
These people, regardless of what they thought they were doing, weren't blowing the whistle on anything because they failed to highlight any illegal behaviour.
Remember that Google is the company that initiated a massive review of pay to try and uncover this supposedly widespread sexist underpaying of women. It discovered it was underpaying men and had to adjust men's pay upwards.
Likewise their big walkout was triggered by the fact that Andy Rubin was fired, but also paid money, after a woman he was in a consensual relationship with discovered he was cheating and made an (unverifiable) accusation against him. But this isn't Google tolerating sexual harassment in any legal sense of the term.
So what makes you think the law has anything to do with their protests?
If by "politics" you mean "not being harassed" or "paid the same for the same work", yes, yes you should be free to bring that to work. Every damn day.
Yes, if only there was some news story alleging that Google treated workers poorly after raising harassment concerns. Sounds like you want to see that!
From the actual article: ```She was one of six women who organized massive walkouts after reports that Google paid handsome sums to executives accused of sexual harassment.```
I have no idea why her reporting or not reporting these incidents is relevant. Also not sure why this the protest was 'generic'. Your comment comes off as dismissive without any substance. Please feel free to elaborate.
Because it doesn't make sense to protect anybody who mentions an incident of sexual harassment from being fired. Because then everybody would be protected from being fired, because everybody can tell a story of some incident they read in the news. Presumably the law is supposed to protect people who have been harassed and report it.
So...You shouldn't be able to protest something unless you personally experienced it? Like, if my buddy was sexually harassed, and I wanted to change the culture in my company to reduce the likelihood of this happening again, I shouldn't because I didn't have it happen to me? Your argument seems to be making a lot of assumptions that I don't share.
I can't speak specifically to this case, but yes, that happens all the damn time. Higher-ups are protected in harassment incidents and the victim is retaliated against.
You're composing a bit of a motte-and-bailey argument here. From your replies downthread, it seems clear that you have issues with the underlying concerns of the protests. But your opening bid for the argument is "politics don't belong in the workplace".
If you were up-front about this, you'd say "harassment and discrimination are political issues that shouldn't be organized around". Of course, that argument wouldn't carry well here. But it'd be more intellectually honest.
The fact you're conflating sexual harrassment (which is illegal almost everywhere) with an incredibly politicized concept as "equal compensation" (which even within one's own family there are wide disparities in outcomes, as even siblings from the same house can have widely different career outcomes, let alone in society) says everything...
I also don’t like being told I support sexual harassment because I don’t think highly politicized work environments (note I said work environment not society) are a healthy environment. That’s a dirty tactic.
Way to chop off my sentence at the perfect point for you to counter it, while ignoring the rest of the context it was said. I’ve edited it now so it won’t be.
Well, you edited it a bit now but my point is, you're either misunderstanding or misrepresenting what "equal compensation" is about. If it's the former, the linked page is a good place to start.
I could link you to plenty of politic hot topics that I care about. But I don’t see how that helps explain the role of highly politicized work environments.
Violence on the other hand also has no place in the work environment. Which is why harassment of all forms isn’t tolerated.
It's not a matter of 'hot topics' or 'politicization'. Workers demands for fair compensation in general have a long history and are a central part of the relationship between employer and employee. If you think the fact that siblings might experience different economic outcomes has anything to do with this, you've (most charitably interpreted) misunderstood the topic.
Wikipedia is not a authoritative source. When it work perfectly it is a proportional description of what third-party sources write in regard to a topic, and at worst it is biased opinion based on a few authors. With political topics the most commonly written opinion might not be the most scientifically correct one.
The main criticism of equal compensation is listed in the Wikipedia page in the first sentences under the title Criticism: the methodology by which the gap is measured.
For example, a common argument is that together with a pay gap there is a similar gap in worked hours, about 1hr on average for full time employees in the same workplace for the same job. Then people tend to dip into discussions about gender roles and bit by bit move the discussion further into the realm of politics.
Equal compensation is thus politics. Not because people disagree on the principle, nor because we don't have a data, but because people will disagree on the interpretation and then jump into political topics in order to support their interpretation.
No imperfection in the Wikipedia page supports either of the notions that systemic compensation issues are an inappropriate topic of workplace advocacy or that equal compensation has anything to do with economic outcomes for siblings (???). Both of these are in nigh non-sequitur territory.
When people say they want politics out of something, what they really mean is they want everyone else's politics out. My beliefs are common sense; your beliefs are partisan politics.
If your politics are encouraging or even accepting of sexual harassment and pay discrimination based on gender, then your 'politics' aren't worth acknowledging, honestly.
I just fixed a bug involving a typo in a regular expression. Do you think that was political? If so, I'd like to see how. If not, I'd like to know how to tell what is political apart from what is not political.
Regardless of how, as long as what your protesting the right things everything else doesn’t matter?