Hundreds of Google staffers met on April 26 to discuss what activists allege is a frequent consequence of criticizing the company: retaliation.
Two leaders of recent company protests said that they have been mistreated by managers and collected similar stories from other workers at the world’s largest Internet company.
Alphabet Inc’s Google set the standard in Silicon Valley for employing and retaining scores of highly trained computer scientists, but the recent troubles have hurt its reputation. Employees registered a decline of faith in Google’s executives in recent internal surveys. Several software coders refused to work on a project for the Pentagon last year, spiking the contract, and some resigned in protest.
In November, several employees organized a company walkout over payouts to executives facing sexual assault allegations. At about that time, the activists gathered 350 accounts of employee concerns.
On April 22, two of those organizers, Meredith Whittaker and Claire Stapleton, wrote an e-mail saying that Google had punished them because of their activism. The two asked staffers to join them to discuss the company’s alleged actions, and during the meeting they shared more than a dozen other stories of internal retribution that they had collected over that week.
“Now more than ever we need to reject retaliation, and reject the culture of fear and silence that retaliation creates,” read an e-mail from the event organizers. “The stakes are too high.”
“We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy,” a Google spokeswoman said in an e-mailed statement.
“To make sure that no complaint raised goes unheard at Google, we give employees multiple channels to report concerns, including anonymously, and investigate all allegations of retaliation,” the spokeswoman said.
Whittaker is a researcher at Google specializing in artificial intelligence. She cofounded a research group, AI Now, that is affiliated with New York University.
Whittaker wrote to her colleagues in an e-mail that she was told she would have to “abandon my work on AI ethics.”
Stapleton, who works in the marketing department at YouTube, alleged that she was informed she was being demoted and later told to take a medical leave that she did not need.
After she retained a lawyer, Stapleton said, the company “walked back my demotion, at least on paper,” but “the environment remains hostile and I consider quitting nearly every day.”
In the e-mail, Stapleton said that she arranged a meeting with Google’s human resources division after flagging changes to her job. She was told to go on sick leave.
When she replied that she was not sick, Stapleton wrote, the director of human resources said: “We put people on it all the time.”
Whittaker tried to get transferred to another Google AI team, a move she said was supported by Jeff Dean, the company’s head of artificial intelligence. Soon afterward, Whittaker was involved with another protest: an employee petition against the appointment of Kay Coles James to an AI ethics counsel organized by Google. The company ended up scrapping the group.
Two weeks after the petition, Whittaker said she learned that her planned transfer had been canceled and that her role at Google would be changing.
“Continuing my work at AI Now and my work in AI ethics was not on the table,” she wrote.
Oona King, Google’s director of diversity strategy, rejected at least one of the employee’s claims.
“I can genuinely say when I’ve looked at the details of one of the cases, it isn’t as it appears here,” she wrote, according to a message viewed by Bloomberg News.
Executives at YouTube and Google Cloud sent messages to staffers earlier this week disputing the accounts of Stapleton and Whittaker, according to a person who had seen them.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by