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Lawsuit: Google employees were fired for upholding “Don’t be evil” code:
Three former Google software engineers who sued the company yesterday claim they were fired for following Google's famous "Don't be evil" mantra.
"Google terminated each plaintiffs' employment with it for adhering to the directive 'Don't be evil' and calling out activity by Google that they each believed betrayed that directive," according to the complaint filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court by Rebecca Rivers, Sophie Waldman, and Paul Duke. The ex-employees say Google falsely blamed them for a data leak after they circulated an internal petition.
The lawsuit notes that the Google Code of Conduct "that each full-time Google employee is required to sign as a condition of employment" specifically instructs them not to be evil. The ex-employees say they tried to uphold the "Don't be evil" policy in August 2019 by circulating a petition "requesting that Google affirm that it would not collaborate with CBP [US Customs and Border Protection] or ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] with respect to enforcement of the Trump border control policies."
"[E]ach plaintiff protested Google's engagement in supporting BCP policies that resulted in separation of families and 'caging' of immigrants who were seeking asylum in the United States," the complaint said.
Google's firings of Rivers, Waldman, and Duke are also part of an ongoing case in which the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Google.
Previously:
(2018-10-13) Google Leak: The Good Censor
(2018-09-14) "Senior Google Scientist" Resigns over Chinese Search Engine Censorship Project
(2018-05-19) "Don't be Evil" Disappearing From Google's Code of Conduct
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @12:28PM (25 children)
Nothing like being non-evil by making sure the most disadvantaged Americans remain on welfare as companies are encouraged to hire under the table people or those from other countries who send there money overseas and for those who like to avoid customs, their movement fuels drug and sex trafficking.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @12:37PM (16 children)
You know what's evil? Using outsourced labor below minimum wage. Whether that be from another country or from prisoners in our own, doing so distorts the labor market unfairly against small business owners.
Owners of small business are unable to fairly xompete by paying minimum wage to local citizens, because their own government is undermining them by allowing companies to use prison slave labor paid less than minimum wage or outsourcing it to another country at below minimum wage.
The cradle to slave incarceration system we have now only benefits those megacorporations at the tippy top--and it absolutely destroys small business' ability to compete. That's completely ignoring the fact that these are human beings. Real, living, conscious, feeling beings having their lives destroyed. They're your neighbors. They're you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HammeredGlass on Thursday December 02 2021, @03:55PM
Both what you say and what you are responding to are true.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Thursday December 02 2021, @10:54PM (12 children)
It sounds like you think the answer to that is to not outsource labor. But there is another way. Lower or eliminate the minimum wage in question and the moral dilemma goes away. This is a common effect with regulation - the perception of evil only exists because the regulation exists. If the moral reasons for the regulation outweighs the moral reasons for circumventing it, then you may well have evil.
A second problem is with the subjectivity of the morality itself. There are other moral goods here such as providing a living for billions of people worldwide or improving the rehabilitation of prisoners by allowing them to work at a trade while they're doing their time. Even the megacorporations have interests that we should respect, if it doesn't support a greater good (and so often it doesn't).
I think of this as an unintended consequence of those minimum wage laws and IMHO a strong indication of the immorality of them.
I think this concern is overblown for several reasons. First, it's not slavery. Just saying.
Second, the very regulations that you mention are what created this situation. Sure, there are economies of scale from global trade and a variety of industries. But there are also economies of scale for dealing with the thicket of complex regulation and taxes/fees/licensing that every business has to deal with. It turns out megacorps are a lot better at dealing with that than the Mom and Pops are.
Third, globalization is greatly improving the lot of humanity worldwide (vastly more than just the "tippy top") and thus, reducing that wage differential that drives most outsourcing. Way back when, about the year 2000, I looked at the wage differential between US and Chinese labor. It was about a factor of six difference back then. Now, it's more like a factor of three (with the US side holding up pretty well). I'd have to look up the numbers to get a better estimate than that. Similar declines in wage differentials have occurred for just about everyone (with most of the present day developed world being a good example, they were collectively a lot worse off relative to the US at the end of the Second World War than they are now).
My take here is that if your morality results in increased suffering for billions of people (which is common for this topic), then you need a better class of morality.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @12:20AM (9 children)
Stopped reading. You've clearly never been in the system. It most certainly IS slavery. It's ownership of a human being (by the state), forced labor (rented out to corporations by the state), and that human is not paid a fair wage, if at all.
Die in a fire, you inhuman piece of shit.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @12:49AM (1 child)
Welcome to SoylentNews where the sociopaths abound and white supremacists work on radicalization and recruitment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @11:37AM
TBF, I've been running a 20 year propaganda campaign aimed at the exact opposite, and it's shown some pretty notable success. Mostly by getting the attention of the people who have the actual ability and position to effect changes by building better systems and calling out bad ones.
Societies change slowly. It's a lifetime task. Probably longer, really.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 03 2021, @01:23AM (4 children)
What is "the system" here?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @07:11AM (3 children)
The US for profit prison system.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 03 2021, @01:21PM (2 children)
You've just covered two million people out of something like 4-5 billion people. The original poster wasn't just talking about the US prison system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @05:06PM (1 child)
The very first words of this thread:
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 03 2021, @07:47PM
At that point, you're talking billions of people not just prisoners in the US.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday December 03 2021, @05:59PM (1 child)
Completely legal slavery!
13th Ammendment:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 06 2021, @08:35AM
Have you tried not committing any crimes where the punishment is incarceration?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @12:48PM (1 child)
Millions of people earning minimum wage today in the US are on the social safety net. So if you eliminate minimum wage, you either need to expand the social safety net or accept that millions more people will be hungry and homeless. I suspect I know which answer you like, and unless I'm pleasantly surprised, we're done talking.
The US has a hundred trillion dollars in net wealth. The idea of eliminating minimum wage when 1% of households have quite literally more than ten million in average wealth is morally abhorrent. The money exists to pay every worker making goods for America $20 an hour or better, the rich simply won't share. I don't believe in hell, but I hope they all go there.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 03 2021, @08:33PM
There's several things to note here. First, I don't buy the model - it has too many unicorns in it. There's several things that get ignored. There are numerous problems that come with these things such as greater unemployment, migration to high living cost areas (because minimum wages hurt those regions less), greater concentration of business, and the outsourcing. Notice that the last two of the problems were listed by the original poster as the reason for higher minimum wage.
Second, it ignores the real problems: excessive cost of living and collective punishment of employers. Supply and demand is a thing here. Make employment more expensive through those minimum wages and safety net taxes on employment and just doing business, and you get less of it. Similarly, more generous social security nets encourages more consumption of those services.
Overall, it's a pretty perverse situation where the cure is the disease.
Will it be less morally abhorrent to destroy society in order to do that? The money exists to pay generic people lots of money, but they aren't generating value to justify that - wages and benefits [heritage.org] track productivity pretty well in the US.
My take is that social safety nets are a continually growing menace. In the US, they're the largest portion of the US budget (more than half) and going up. What happens when the governments of the US can no longer fund roads or law enforcement, because that money is earmarked for pensions, public health care, and similar entitlements? I don't see the number of hungry and homeless people going down when infrastructure falls apart.
Maybe it's time to do what works and pay attention to the economic basics?
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Friday December 03 2021, @01:19AM (1 child)
Just pointing out that the workers are freely taking the jobs and are free to quit at any time.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Friday December 03 2021, @05:36AM
Fixed that for you.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @01:59PM (2 children)
All the government has to do to solve the illegal immigrant labor issue is make it a jailable offense to employ someone off books or for less than minimum wage.
The Republicans and Democrats won't do that, because thousands of millionaires nationwide that donate to both parties built their fortunes by employing illegal immigrants.
The problem here, as in so many other places, are the rich fuckers in power. Not the desperate refugees from Honduras and Nicaragua. The Republicans and Democrats have just made the issue a form of political football, they don't really give a damn about American workers or the illegal immigrants.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 02 2021, @04:42PM (1 child)
It's more than that, though. The tech companies abuse the H1-B system to bring in labor for less than the going rate in-country in order to suppress wages. The H1-B's are not working for less than minimum wage, but it still has a deleterious effect on citizens who paid first-world fees for a first-world degree only to find out that the companies they thought they'd work for and earn first-world wages from suddenly only want to pay third-world rates.
We talk about tech companies often here so I used them as an example, but it's used by many more companies in other sectors in the USA; my brother works for one of the big 3 in Detroit and his company does it, too.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @12:55AM
I was replying in particular to the parent post, which seemed focus on illegal immigrants taking bottom tier wage jobs and - according to them - facilitating the sex trade and sending their earnings overseas.
I agree with what you wrote, but as bad as that is, I think it's less of an issue. Even the people in tech or medicine that despise the immigrants driving down wages, they don't consider them subhuman or advocate violence towards them. When it comes to Latinos crossing the southern border, it seems like half the US wants to stick them in gas chambers. And again, they're only coming because they can find better work here than at home, and they can only find better work here because our government never punishes the people who hire them.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Thursday December 02 2021, @03:42PM (4 children)
"Don't be evil" was a lie from the outset. There is no such thing as an honest billionaire.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday December 02 2021, @06:02PM (2 children)
Google said "don't be evil", so they can't lie.
They wouldn't lie because that would be evil.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday December 02 2021, @09:05PM
Plus lying on record is something you can find yourself defending yourself against in court.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday December 04 2021, @03:51PM
...says Lucifer
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @05:41PM
Says the person who wasn't there from the outset.
Do you remember the 1990s? With WebCrawler, Lycos, Yahoo, AOL, Ask Jeeves and all the others?
Google wasn't billionaires at the start. They were not evil. They gave better search results than others. They clearly highlighted what was advertisements (and made sure they were not intrusive, no flashing marquee), championed standardization and usefulness, and several other things.
Are they evil now? Arguably. Don't pretend it was a lie from the "outset."
(Score: -1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @01:05PM (6 children)
So, some political activists were agitating within the company, demanding that Google participate in that whole "surge the border" thing. Their political activism cost their jobs because employers (other than George Soros) seldom pay employees to politically activate themselves on the job.
Maybe they should have left the activism for after hours, when they are free to do whatever they like.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @01:15PM (5 children)
Their argument is precisely that they were, in actual fact, employed with compensation for the purpose of "do[ing] no evil", among other employment duties assigned them.
Your defense would hold water in just about any other company, but Google put it in writing as a term of their employment, allegedly. Which means your comment is pointless.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @03:08PM (4 children)
This being evil is pretty questionable and ultimately, I think they're going to have a hard time making their case that participating in this was evil. If we were taking the migrants and running them through a meat grinder to produce dog food or fertilizer, that would be different. I don't see anything mentioned that is clearly evil to a reasonable observer. But, who knows, maybe they will be able to make and prove a case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @03:25PM
Yeah, I personally don't think they have a leg to stand on. But, they appear to be technically correct in being employed for that stated purpose.
It's vaguely hilarious what companies will put in writing--unenforceable, outright illegal, or otherwise. I worked for a company that had an express written policy of illegally punishing the use of sick time (against state law) to the extent that they had a points system and kept records of every crime they commited.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @10:57AM (2 children)
No, they won't. If Google really put "don't be evil" in their personnel handbook, employee guides or even the employee contract, it is up to that same text to explicitly define that term. If the term is left undefined, the judge is going to side with the first-party interpretation of the term, and first-party here is the employee. not the employer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @11:40AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 04 2021, @03:59AM
Yes, but the signing party doesn't have unlimited leeway to interpret the contract terms. Yes, they do get a lot of it if the terms aren't defined, but this would be a significant stretch and would lead to issues with other people interpreting the same language the other way. The language would still revert to something resembling customary usage of the term. So, in all likelihood they wouldn't just get to define these specific things as being evil, that's likely a stretch too far. They might get away with it, but just because something isn't defined in the contract doesn't grant the non-drafting party unlimited ability to define terms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @01:33PM (1 child)
I'm not sure who is right, either morally or legally.
Most of the "moral" opposition is actually about the wrong political party being in power and has nothing to do with the actual actions being taken. Was Google even involved?
But in a situation where the company has asked all employees to consider the morality of the company's actions, they should not be fired for doing exactly that.
In the end, I expect that "don't be evil" will be held to be unenforceably vague under the rules of contract law, and the firings will be upheld. But it's interesting, anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @06:06PM
Government contracts are worth a shitload of money, whichever side of politics is in power.
Rightly or wrongly, half the country elected Trump as their Emperor/Demi-god for 4 years; any wonder any republican voters within the company told them to STFU? 'Evil' in the context of a presidential decree would never be upheld in a court within that jurisdiction, at least while that politician is in office.
Leaking an internal discussion would have you fired in most companies. Whether that's grounds for wrongful termination under whistleblower protections is another matter but I suspect the trio will have difficulty finding work at a number of large, $EVIL corporations.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Thursday December 02 2021, @01:44PM (12 children)
"Don't be evil" was abandoned years ago. It is incompatible with a shareholder driven company.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @01:52PM (3 children)
When did Mission/Vision Statements become legally binding?
(Score: 5, Informative) by mhajicek on Thursday December 02 2021, @03:11PM (2 children)
When they're in an employment contract.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @03:29PM (1 child)
This.
Normally, they wouldn't be. But someone was dumb enough to put it in writing as part of a formal contract.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @07:06PM
when virtue signaling goes wrong
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 02 2021, @02:09PM (6 children)
"Don't be evil" was never an enforceable concept. Evil is not a legally defined, nor definable term.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @02:52PM
> Evil is not a legally defined, nor definable term.
Agreed. But I know evil when I see it!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @04:46PM
I think that if they were grinding the migrants up for dogfood, that would probably qualify, but there's so much wrong with a tech company doing that, that it wouldn't come down to a contract term in an employment contract.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 02 2021, @06:29PM (1 child)
A lot of people would consider non-enforcement of the President's policies to be evil. Should they also be spending their work hours doing the exact opposite of what the engineers in question were doing?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 02 2021, @08:28PM
That's the problem right there... when 49% of people consider something evil, is it still evil? How about 4.9%? Where does it stop?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday December 02 2021, @11:42PM (1 child)
Oh yeah? Well how does Detect Evil [dndbeyond.com] work then?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 03 2021, @12:34AM
Fantasy land. The DM knows evil when he creates it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @02:44PM
Shareholder driven company?
Try any company aiming for big growth, no matter the ownership structure.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @01:53PM (3 children)
I get triggered by the phrase "call out". It reliably indicates SJW activity. Google may be evil now, but seeing the phrase alone, without any further reading, makes me certain that Google was right to kick them out. Hopefully on the spot, and as far and as wide as they could.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @06:09PM (2 children)
You're triggered by a journalist using an expression, regardless of whether the participants ever uttered the phrase?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @01:45AM (1 child)
Valid objection, but yes. The use of this linguistic feature is limited to those with an SJW mindset. It works as a code. The journalist wouldn't have used those words if s/he wouldn't think that the employees have the same agenda. It is an example of more subtle mutilation of English to Newspeak than usual. To those outside the scene, "calling out" would mean the opposite of "dialing in".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @02:21AM
(Same poster again). Thinking about it, the non-technical meaning of "calling out" I had left out is interesting: In normal use of the English language, it has the association of underlings (enlisted men, school kids, ...) having to line up in rank and file for a superior (officer, teacher, ...) who will separate out some of the underlings for punishment. The use of the term by SJWs is a deceitful appropriation of this association in order to appear more powerful. That's NLP on a level with the most scummy financial salespeople.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 02 2021, @04:51PM
I like the sentiment, and back when Google was a search engine started by a couple of academics who had no idea how to make money from it, it made me smile. When Google started to find its financial footing during the early days of the Dot-com, when measured against the shenanigans that many of the pump-and-dump schemes of that time were running, it seemed a reasonable guard rail against misbehavior. Later when Google began to overtake and displace Microsoft, it felt like a brake on the course the company seemed to be steering. Of course, we should all know by now that "don't be evil" was jettisoned by Alphabet some years ago, so it's a moot point.
But the idea was always notional, and never legally enforceable. What one party says is evil the other says is benign. It was always going to be a matter of interpretation when the employees demand that management agree to their political demands. The only part of this story that surprises me a little is that the employees were fired for espousing political beliefs that the management of Google publicly supports. It's like the employees were fired for agreeing with the stances the company takes.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @07:04PM
What else do you expect?
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @07:15PM (2 children)
Providing political support to non-White invaders is racial treason and therefore treason under legitimate US law as the USA was founded by and for Whites. Non-whites have no business being here. The Jews that brought the African slaves over and have worked ever since to bring in more non-Whites and change our laws should be forced to pay for repatriation right before they are forced to go home themselves.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02 2021, @08:35PM (1 child)
I shouldn't feed the trolls but, boy, Yankland is fucked if you actually believe that doggerel.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @12:51AM
We're busy testing out whether the country as a while actually believes in freedom, or if we'll continue allowing racist dirtbags to get away with murder. Not looking good, lots of conservatives truly have no idea they support satan's spawn.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edinlinux on Thursday December 02 2021, @11:51PM (2 children)
Enforcing border laws is not 'evil'.
If people are unhappy with the law, and want an open border, then they can write their congressperson and get the law changed to open the border.
Trying to subvert federal law in the way they are trying, now that is evil..
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @12:24AM
Do your border laws require forced sterilization without consent? Fucking asshole.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/25/ice-is-accused-sterilizing-detainees-that-echoes-uss-long-history-forced-sterilization/ [washingtonpost.com]
This is beyond enforcement. This is inhumane, and indefensible. If you think this ia degensible, let me rape your daughter and cut out her organs, because that's literally what you're supporting. Fucking piece of shit.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday December 03 2021, @01:33AM
You don't understand. Good == what I believe and Evil == what you believe.
I seem to remember at one point society moved beyond that level of thinking, but here we are.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1, Troll) by JustNiz on Friday December 03 2021, @01:15AM (3 children)
> 'caging' of immigrants who were seeking asylum in the United States.
Newsflash: Seeking asylum is done through legal channels. Just crashing the border makes you a criminal not an immigrant.
Criminals have been caged since forever. Get over it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @07:46AM
Define 'crashing the border'. Asylum seeking can only be done at an embassy or port of entry (including border crossings). Sneaking across is illegal, but they've been arresting people who were following the law by presenting themselves as asylum seekers at the border.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Username on Friday December 03 2021, @09:42AM (1 child)
When the divine prophet Obama put children in cages, it was a endearing act of compassion to protect children of color from their cisgendered alt-right controlling parents, and enabled them to pursue their trans-rights.
When the blue eyed devil Drumph put children in cages, it was a heinous act of evil to hamper progress, suppress upward mobility, and to separate minor-attracted persons from their loved ones.
When the beloved Biden puts children in cages, it is an act of love and charity, giving them a home they didn't have, sheltering them from the bigotry and hate.
When the racist republican that replaces Biden puts children in cages, it will be an act of hate and score against love and peace, a terrible act of terrorism that will bring upon us the end of of civilization, and bring us back to clubbing our neighbors over the head and stealing their possesions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 04 2021, @07:55AM
Wew lad! So apparently that is an actual, unironic thing which falls under the "+" in "LGBT+." How progressive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 04 2021, @06:14AM
I am not so gullible to believe when my employer says to speak up they won't hold it against me anyway, but to fire them and then lie about them doing some data stealing with a public statement? Goodbye future employment, yea I would sue their ass too. I hope all three get retirement level cash even after the lawyers take their cut