Yes. And it’s right there in the Guardian article above.
He’d already had his say, to the people who were actually in charge of the issue he wanted to talk about. But he wasn’t satisfied with having his say. He wasn’t going to let it go until he got agreed with. Which is not something everybody has a right to.
So Google is going to claim that it rose to the level of him being a constant complainer and thus a problem? Hard to do when they admit they fired him for the content of the memo, not for how hard he pushed it.
Damore’s complaint also shows that at least one employee advocated for not hiring white males at all, and yet there was no retaliation. That is apparently an acceptable view at Google.
Here’s a list of pretty insane stuff that goes on in Google:
An employee named Kim Burchett outright said, “Don’t hire white men”. Burchett still works for Google despite advocating an illegal and discriminatory hiring policy. Damore got fired for far less.
Alex Hidalgo, an engineer, said he would hound Damore until one of them was fired. Obviously, Damore was fired. Hidalgo was not, despite threatening to create a hostile workplace for Damore.
Adam Fletcher, a manager, told Damore that he was being blacklisted even outside Google.
Kim Burchett comes up again, she wanted to make a list of people unsupportive of diversity. Well, Kim, I can assure you that you are now on quite a few lists.
At the very least, since James Damore is now a very famous person due to his “extreme” views, it’s good that other Google Employees have now been named and their views exposed to the public.
If there’s a legal right to advocate for workplace changes, I doubt that it’s fully satisfied by providing a black hole email address for people to send advocacy to and get ignored.
The “eager for a reaction” part of the Guardian quote seems to be questionable editorializing, implying that he was trolling. I’ve read his memo and, while I disagree with a lot of it, it’s clearly not trolling. He may be wrong, but his attempt appears sincere. His memo seems like it would be at home in Great Debates, here, for example.
It’s possible that he was spamming unrelated email lists with this, but the leaked memo came from a mailing list that seemed to be designed for this sort of discussion. If he were spamming say, every mailing list from the “Google Boardgame Club” or “Google Catholics” email lists (to make up a few), maybe some of them would have leaked it?
adaher I am going to wait for more information. The information I do have now, in addition to Mr. Damore’s statement, consists of almost 2 decades of working in close proximity with Google and being well aware of their hiring practices and culture, which have not always been stellar. I am also aware of Mr. Damore’s behavior to date, which is bizarre.
He may or may not have a case, but frankly it’s too soon to say.
You expect consistency? Not in this world.
I’d note that other reports say that Damore’s memo was leaked by another employee. The Guardian’s report is the first I’ve seen claiming that Damore himself leaked it.
It does not look like he has a case at all. It looks like a rhetorical technique. There’s a reason he says discrimination against “white male conservatives,” not just white males, and most of the claimed incidents are about discriminating against people for conservative ideas (or not discriminating against them for bad liberal ones.). But political affiliation is not a protected class.
It seems to me that the parts of his claim which are provable are not actionable, and the parts of his claim that are actionable are not provable.
That federal law you claim might change that, but I find its existence and application to this sort of thing doubtful. It would fly in the face of the at-will employment in the rest of the U.S. How often have we seen people fired for criticizing their company? If it exists at all, it probably is narrowly tailored to private communications in appropriate places–something like “you can’t be fired if you use the proper procedure to make a suggestion.”
I honestly think this is a conservative activist playing to his base, and possibly hoping they can scare Google into some sort of settlement, since they are in the middle of problems from the other side. They are hoping Google will be pragmatic for themselves, and will give a payout. Litigating is expensive.
But I hope Google will take this and squash the “discrimination against conservatives is illegal” concept once and for all.
Cite that there was no retaliation? I assume that you’ll link to a full copy of the employee’s HR file, right? :dubious::rolleyes:
Which other reports say that Damore’s memo was leaked by another employee? Can you provide some examples?
No. He sought to make diversity no longer a moral concept, and Google should only care about Google. He sought to remove any actual attempts at diversity, and instead focused on token efforts based on pseudoscience and bad interpretation of the actual underlying science. He pushed the idea of biological determinism.
At no point did he argue the current attempts were failing. He just was morally opposed to them.
He pushed the oft-repeated but stupid idea that conservatism and liberalism both need to exist and balance each other out. But they don’t. At least, not as conservatism is practiced in the U.S. The only conservative quality he cited that was good was “pragmatism.” But that’s not even a conservative value. Conservatives are just as much about idealism with their ideals, and liberals are just as pragmatic when they attempt to fight these things. Hell, what do you think Google was doing with its blacklisting? That’s pragmatism, vs. the idealism of just treating everyone equally and hoping it all works out.
Also, he was against political correctness, which means he promotes being able to discriminate openly against people. That’s what PC is, after all.
The whole letter was basically a call for Google to become more conservative. It was against its attempts at diversity, not about improving them. It was okay with the fact that there might be less diversity under their practices.
It was and is anti-diversity.
It is in California and some other states, although the protections are more limited than other protections. Still, political views are protected to some extent in California.
Actually, he has one big provable claim: he got fired for a rather reasonable argument about why Google’s diversity programs aren’t working, while an employee who actively called for discrimination against white males remains in a management position.
At will employment has never prevented companies for getting sued for wrongful termination. All “at will” means is that you can fire someone as long as you don’t do it for illegal reasons. Such as discrimination, but also retaliation for certain protected acts, such as unionizing, whistleblowing, legitimate complaints about things like harassment, and advocating for workplace improvements.
Conservatives are not a protected class in the sense of hiring and promotions, but they are very much a protected class in many states when employers retaliate against them for their views and political activity. And Google came right out and said they were retaliating.
As they say, when the facts are on your side, argue the facts. The facts are on Damore’s side. When the law is on your side, argue the law. Google will probably argue that their actions were lawful. Maybe they are. Admittedly, the law has never been used to successfully sue for political discrimination in California, and I’ve looked hard. But this is also an egregrious case where the retaliation for political views is not in doubt and Google has a culture of intimidation against conservatives in general. Even if you believe it’s okay for companies to discriminate against employees for their political views, I don’t see how anyone can support a corporate culture this egregrious. Would it be okay for Hobby Lobby and Chik-Fil-A to punish people who express pro-choice views? One of the reasons we don’t have many laws protecting political speech for workers is because employers have not been inclined to punish and then further, BLACKLIST employees for having the wrong views. Once you go from just being a shitty company to actively ruining lives, then you have to start looking into protections. Hopefully the courts do the right thing here so Congress doesn’t have to. At the very least, hopefully this chills any ideas smaller companies who don’t like getting sued have about firing employees whose views they don’t like.
Horse pucky. Plenty of psychologist stated that the Damore memo was basically right. For example:
And
The last quote is from Debra Soh on the last link.
Yes, some other scientists disagree. But to paint Damore as using pseudoscience for the base of his memo is wrong. The research he cited is relevant and he represented it fairly. For a reasonably in-depth review of the actual science, check here.
I read that whole section, by Geoffrey Miller (his part is 3 of 4) and he comes across like an idiot who doesn’t at all understand what “diversity” means in the workplace nor why it is desired.
He focuses only on genetic possibility, while ignoring the real-world factors that influence a person’s development and opportunities which occur mostly because of a person’s perceived race and/or gender.
Workplace diversity, AIUI, seeks to smooth over those possible differences, with the goal that people will someday be able to be judged independently of their perceived race and/or gender because at that time, they will no longer be factors in people’s development and opportunities.
As such, his arguments and observations with regard to this memo are mostly stupid and worthless, IMO.
The challenge for Damore in this case may lie in obtaining a ruling that he was in fact “advocating for workplace improvements” or making a political expression, rather than deprecating his fellow employees or simply ranting. One can see the company arguing that the definition of the protected activity must be narrowly construed and that Damore went outside those narrow limits.
Yeah, I’m skimming adaher’s posts and BigT’s responses and both sound biased. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. What I read of his memo seemed underwhelming on the outrage meter, but he’s acted really immaturely in the aftermath, and teamed up with some people who espouse seriously awful ideologies. This makes me question how he really was behaving at the time of his termination. It’s an interesting little study on the culture wars, isn’t it?
My major impression on reading the original memo was “this guy’s an arrogant tosser.” And that hasn’t changed. But to be fair, the court filing does a decent job of making the case “yeah, but there are plenty of OTHER arrogant tossers in the company not getting fired, as long as they’re directing their arrogance and tosserhood in the correct political direction.”
Whether or not that gets him a judgement in his favour I don’t know - it smacks a little of the old “but everyone ELSE was doing 80 in a 60 zone so why am I getting a ticket?” defence.
As it happens, I have a few Former Co-Workers who are now Google employees - and one of those people is cited in Danmore’s case. And I happen to think that FCW in question is a pretty decent dude. It makes me think poorly of a person if they manage to behave in such a way that FCW thinks they’re a total irredeemable maroon that would poison any team that had the misfortune to employ him.
On the other hand, many of the posts cited in the document are aggressively right-on enough to think that I would not enjoy working with that person either - if they insisted on talking about politics. But as I understand the culture of Google, it seems that everyone has the ability to exert some sort of control over what teams they will or will not be part of. In that sort of environment, if you’re a person that few people like the personality or politics of, then fewer people are going to want to work with you … I don’t see any way around that.
Two points:
No one expressed a problem with Damore before his memo leaked. The outrage was entirely over the memo, not previous behavior. No one knew he harbored such “dark” thoughts.
While Google’s model of letting people choose the teams they’ll work on could have made firing him a necessity since no one would want to work with him, they’d better be able to provide evidence that the Damore memo made it impossible for him to continue within Google’s corporate culture. and that Google has taken steps to discourage harassment and intimidation over political differences. It’s one thing if people just don’t want to work with him. It’s another entirely if some people don’t want to work with him but others do, but are afraid they’ll face intimidation and harassment if they do work with him.
At the very least, Google’s poisonous political culture is being exposed and I hope this causes changes. There’s no place for that kind of behavior being normalized in any company. That kind of crap wouldn’t even be acceptable at MSNBC or Fox, who actually are overtly ideological enterprises. And yet people from the other side can work there and even get on TV.
I wonder if they’ve considered that perhaps one reason their divesity programs don’t work is because they are a hostile environment for women and minorities with conservative views? It’s not surprising that a company filled with essentially Bernie Bros wouldn’t be doing to well on the diversity front. That particular brand of virulent left wingism is primarily a white phenomenon.
Tim Pool did a podcast yesterday on how Damore was demonized by the press, I wonder how much of the negativity he gets is from people only being exposed to blatantly biased reporting.
FWIW, in my experience, women who work in what’s seen as traditionally male professions tend to be more conservative than liberal in their personalities.