Social Justice Ideology Within Google Escalates, Huge Protest
College Social Justice Protests Have Entered The Workforce. Among their list of demands over abuse allegations, google staffers around the world demanded that the company institute a policy of hiring people based on gender and race at all levels of the company and be penalized for it.These appear to be the same type of protests you would see at college only now its happening at google. Typically these types of diversity and social justice demands were seen at schools but now we see the same phenomenon happening at Google offices.The demands being made are not compensatory ones but demands of ideological changes within the company.
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In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, a GQ journalist said to him that what happens in colleges tends not to follow these people after they leave, and that as people get older, they become more conservative.
That's an interesting point to make.
However, Jordan Peterson countered, saying, no, it's going to start affecting the real world, and now we might actually be seeing this as a massive walkout happened today at Google around the world, various Google offices.
Now people were protesting some things that kind of make sense.
They want an end to forced arbitration when it comes to sexual harassment.
But they're also demanding diversity requirements across the board and a chief diversity officer who answers to the CEO.
So we can see that what happens in college actually does start affecting the real world and business.
What's interesting is that it's often been said, a business that prioritizes diversity over meritocracy will suffer.
And if these protests continue, it could be bad news for Google.
But are the demands from these protesters unreasonable?
Let's take a look, and we'll start by reading the first story about the walkout.
From CNN, Google employees are walking out over sexual harassment scandals.
However, the protesters have actually issued a list of demands, and it's not necessarily about sexual harassment scandals, but we'll read what CNN has to say.
Google employees around the world walked out of their offices on Thursday in a global protest over how the company deals with sexual harassment.
This is not true.
The demonstrations, dubbed Google Walkout, follow an outcry over a New York Times investigation that detailed years of sexual harassment allegations, multi-million dollar severance packages for accused executives, and a lack of transparency over the cases.
Before Google employees got to work in the United States, around 150 Google employees in India participated in the walkouts, a company spokesman in the country told CNN.
Google staffers around the world walked out of their offices at 11.10 a.m.
local time, according to social media posts, they want changes at the company that include an end to the use of forced arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination.
We're walking out in support of those who've been harassed everywhere in the workplace, and to ensure that perpetrators are not rewarded and are not protected, Sam Dutton, a developer advocate at Google, told CNN in London.
So I want to clarify.
The protest isn't entirely about sexual harassment, though it may have precipitated it, and many people will highlight this, but this is what the media is reporting far and wide, that this is why they're doing it.
But there's actually other reasons, and it actually reflects what we see across these universities with similar demands about diversity and diversity quotas.
The Cut published this story this morning.
We're the organizers of the Google Walkout.
Here are our demands.
All employees protesting today are united in calling for these changes, an end to forced arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination, for all current and future employees, along with a right for every Google worker to bring a co-worker, representative, or supporter of their choosing when meeting with HR, especially when filing a harassment claim.
I want to take a stop right here and say, listen, some of these things make sense.
Forced arbitration?
Sure, that's debatable.
If you want to have a discussion about that in the workplace and what's in your contract, by all means.
However, they start getting into equity demands, and that's kind of what I want to talk about today in terms of these protests and what it means for businesses moving forward.
Equity demands might be arbitrary and are extremely hard to define.
They want to put people in positions of power within the company, not based on their ability to do their job, but based on what they look like or their gender.
Which could mean bad news for a business if protests like this actually succeed.
One of their demands is a commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity.
They're not talking about inequality, they're talking about inequity.
And I want to talk about that in a minute, but let's see what they had to say.
For example, making sure there are women of color at all levels of the organization and accountability for not meeting this commitment.
This must be accompanied by transparent data on the gender, race, and ethnicity compensation gap across both levels and years of industry experience, accessible to all Google and Alphabet employees and contractors.
Such data must include, but not be limited to, information on relative promotion rates, under-leveling at higher, The handling of leaves and inequity in project and job letter change opportunities.
The methods by which such data was collected and the techniques by which it was analyzed and aggregated must also be transparent.
I want to point out that their demands over sexual harassment transparency and a clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct, these seem entirely reasonable.
No person should have to deal with harassment in the workplace by no means.
But attached to their demands are these equity issues, one of which is promote the chief diversity officer to answer directly to the CEO and make recommendations directly to the board of directors.
In addition, appoint an employee representative to the board.
Both the CDO and the employee representative should help allocate permanent resources for demands 1 through 4 and other equity efforts, ensure accountability to these demands, and propose changes when equity goals are not met.
So let's talk a little bit about equity before looking at what happened with some of these protests.
People often discuss the difference between equality and equity.
For me, I'm mostly in favor of equality.
Equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.
Equality of outcome is when you say, there should be a woman of color at every level of the company.
But what happens if women of color don't want to be at every level of the company?
Well, it should be their choice.
Now, we shouldn't restrict people based on arbitrary reasons like the color of their skin or their gender.
If someone applies for the job and they're good enough to do it and you want them, by all means choose them.
There are many different reasons as to why someone might be good at a job and not good at a job, and merit and skill aren't the only factors.
Let's say you have somebody who happens to be a white male who's really, really smart and a great engineer.
Are they bad with people?
Well, they might be a bad fit.
It actually might make sense to bring on somebody who is more personable and might not be as technically skilled because working at a company like Google requires working as a team.
But I want to focus on what I think are the biggest problems with equity as it's being pushed by the far left.
Look at this image.
It makes sense, and the average person can understand it.
Here we have three people, tall, medium, and short, and they're all equal, being handed one crate, but the short person can't see over the fence.
They say that's not fair.
With equity, the tall person doesn't need a crate, the medium person just needs one, and the short person needs two.
When someone sees this, they say, hey, I kind of understand this.
This makes sense.
What's important here, though, is that equality and equity are not being determined based on the race of the individuals.
They all look to be the same.
The same race and the same gender.
So the problem then with equity as they're pushing it is someone's race or gender doesn't mean they're going to be good at their job.
It doesn't mean they're going to be personable.
It doesn't mean anyone's going to want to work with them.
It doesn't mean they're going to have the skills required to actually perform what needs to be done at this company.
So what people have brought up to me is there's a problem here.
What we're seeing is a massive walkout of Google across the world.
And that means Google now has enough people to disrupt the company who care more about ideology than the functioning of the business.
And don't get me wrong, you need to have people who care about the community and you need to have people who care about the workload.
But it seems now that the push is being made for people who care more about ideology than work.
This can only punish Google.
Now, in my opinion, Why do these companies keep doing this?
Why do they get away with it?
Because it's hard to punish Google for things like this when their profit margin is so damn high and they have a near monopoly on online advertising.
Because of that, Google might lose revenue, they might lose stock value, but for the most part they're still profitable and they're going to succeed.
This creates room for people to protest things like this and demand arbitrary things like a certain person of a certain color in a certain position.
What I find to be most interesting about all of this is the fact that what we're seeing at Google typically resembles what you see at colleges.
Walkout protests.
Sure, sometimes people strike.
They make demands of their workplace.
But these are ideological demands, for the most part, and not compensatory demands.
These are not people who are saying things like, we deserve more wages.
These are things like Time's Up and Workers' Rights Are Women's Rights.
They are advocating for ideological goals and not making more money or bettering their lives or getting more rights from the workplace.
Sure, they want some changes that make sense, 100%.
But for the most part, it looks like this protest culture that we've seen emerging at colleges has now made its way into Google, for instance.
And Google is a company that will live or die by its business.
Google can't adopt ideological positions that cause it to lose money, otherwise it will cease to function.
CNN says that Google CEO Sundar Pichai has voiced his support for the walkouts.
I think there are real concerns for what goes on with sexual harassment in the workplace.
Apparently there are a lot of executives who got huge payouts and were able to leave the company following the accusations made against them.
Some of them are pretty serious.
And I think protests over that are fine and warranted.
But the equity demands are where it gets really interesting.
As I mentioned, it's kind of like we're seeing this ideological protest culture of colleges now affecting major international business.
You have to realize that Google's ideology is extremely relevant to politics.
We know for a fact that Google often shows left-leaning content in search results simply because that's what people end up seeing.
But Google is putting forth an initiative to show more real news on YouTube, and that means alternative creators will pay the price and will suffer because of it.
YouTube is trying to get rid of what they call the fringes.
If Google is facing these kinds of protests, where people are making ideological demands, if they want certain people of certain ideologies at every level of the company, it's not about what's best for the company, it's about spreading their politics throughout the company, and then when you have people at a high enough position who hold these ideologies, that will come out through the product, and will have a huge impact on the rest of our country.
But another thing that I think is particularly relevant to talk about is how these protests are affecting foreign cultures, And in a sense disrespecting them.
Look, you can't assume that what people believe in London or New York is the same thing that people will believe in Singapore or other countries.
People from different places of the world have different belief structures and different cultures.
But because Google is a massive, multinational, billion-dollar corporation, when things happen internally at Google, where admittedly most people who work there are going to be wealthy or wealthy-ish, They spread these ideas through the internal communications, and now have a huge impact on the culture of foreign countries where people are working, say, in Singapore.
Ultimately, what I think is most interesting about this Google protest is just that ideology is becoming more important than a functioning business.
Back in the day, it was all about meritocracy, but every day we move closer and closer towards ideology over meritocracy.
And as many people have said, if a business doesn't care about the product it's making and it cares more about an ideology, or the workers do, then you can't expect that business to do well in the long run if they let their product suffer just to make sure that someone at some position in the company looks a certain way.
But let me know what you think in the comments below, we'll keep the conversation going.
How do you feel about this?
There are a lot of other stories I could have talked about, but I found it interesting that what happened in New York resembles these college protests so much.
Obviously, as people graduate college and get jobs at these companies, they're going to bring that ideology and culture with them.
So again, let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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