Contents page 1 — “We are not just employees, we are the owner of” page 2 — no longer silenced On a page
read It an impressive action: there are More than 20,000 Google employees and was an employee in the world, resigned last Thursday at 11.10 p.m., the work and demonstrated in front of their offices against sexual harassment in the workplace. The number comes from the organizers. If you are wrong, left one out of every five employees of the Internet group’s office.
protested The Googlers, at least at first glance, especially against a figure: 90 million. With so many dollars have been sweetens the Android inventor Andy Rubin 2014, the departure of Google after he was accused of, to have a colleague with whom he had an affair, to have oral sex forced (which denies Rubin). This and other cases had been uncovered in the previous week by the New York Times. The clean imaging company, had resigned apparently unclean behavior and the offender. “I don’t like to go for a 90 – million-sexual harassment”, it said, accordingly, on the protest sign of a staff member in San Francisco, “90 million reasons for change” on a other in New York.
it was a relatively comfortable Protest, like everything else with Google: The action is not a wild and risky strike, which Google’s head Sundar Pichai had endorsed explicitly and the Department managers are instructed to give your employees a short break. In an email he had shown himself ruefully: “We hear you,” wrote Pichai. “I commit myself, in case of a Problem, progress, the to exist already much to long in our society … and Yes, even here at Google.” The Google co-founders Larry Page had been known previously in one of the regular Friday afternoon meetings: “If only a Person at Google, not experience, as the New York Times article describes, then we are the company that we want to be.”
The Power of employees
Such tones sound familiar. Self-flagellation seems to be the key of the year 2018, the tech corporations. The heads of Uber, Twitter, and Starbucks had to give priority to grievances, almost always it came to sexual misconduct of senior staff.
Google harassment scandals were just the final impetus for the biggest Tech-staff, demo of all time. Several times had excited in the past year, dissatisfaction: employees criticized the collaboration between Google and the us Department of defense – in to the project Maven to build an artificial intelligence for military drones has been developed and the plans to build a censored Version of the Google search engine for China. The fit for many not-for-2015 officially abolished the Google Motto Don t be evil (not evil).
Protest against sexual harassment is not a one-point-action against the maladministration of the past, is turned off according to the asseveration of the company’s management a long time ago (Google have released in the last few years, 48 employees because of sexual harassment, all without a severance package, says Pichai). The organizers, six women and a man, set up a catalogue of demands, which is likely to deal with the management. It is political demands that are unheard of by American standards. It comes to transparency, extended rights, and even to a participation of the employees in the company’s management. The word “participation” could find their way into the American vernacular.
Previously, it was a cliché of the tech world in Silicon Valley, that companies to lure in employees with high salaries and the working life is as pleasant as possible: free food around the clock, a Shuttle Bus with Wi-Fi, the travel is counted against the working hours, unlimited vacation, free massages for the stiff programmers neck. Not (only) from people love, but because highly qualified workers are rare and on average every one and a half years of the Job change. The protests show that the employees, despite all the amenities, not the Thinking buy. “These people are not easy to replace, and therefore, they have a significant Power,” says Kade Crockford, the observed for the human rights organization, the ACLU, tech companies.
