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.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
GLOBAL ECONOMY: Policymakers have a choice of a small 25 basis-point cut or a bold cut of 50 basis points, which would help the labor market, but might reignite inflation The US Federal Reserve is gearing up to announce its first interest rate cut in more than four years on Wednesday, with policymakers expected to debate how big a move to make less than two months before the US presidential election. Senior officials at the US central bank including Fed Chairman Jerome Powell have in recent weeks indicated that a rate cut is coming this month, as inflation eases toward the bank’s long-term target of two percent, and the labor market continues to cool. The Fed, which has a dual mandate from the US Congress to act independently to ensure