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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: 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?