Sexual harassment and retaliation against employees for reporting it is not "just being jerks".
It is illegal.
It is illegal.
It is a tort, civil violation, etc...but nobody is going to jail.
What's your point?
"Expanding Rights under the “Retaliation” Provision of Title VII. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (the “Act”) prohibits an employer from retaliating against an employee who has “made a charge, testified, assisted or participated in” any charge of unlawful discrimination under the Act."
http://www.sgrlaw.com/ttl-articles/826/
If the civil rights act of 1964 prohibits something, I think that that fits the common definition of "illegal" that a normal person would use.
Maybe a lawyer would use a different word, but who cares, everyone understood what you meant.
The key test is 'primarily'. Commenting occasionally on political topics, among others, is fine. But using the site primarily for political battle is not fine, regardless of which politics you favor. It's destructive of the intended use of the site, which is the gratification of intellectual curiosity. Since we can't have both kinds of site, we have to be careful about this.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...
Lastly, the political debate is often the thing I find interesting about the comment threads on HN, Its getting to see the different viewpoints which interests me. Ofcourse we have to be civil and respectful towards each other, but when we are, I don't see any problem on any topic, how can any topic be destructive to the intended use of the site?
I also find it crazy they do this in the threads and not by email, very easy to miss if you don't religiously check your /threads. I got a warning from dang once and he claimed I'd been warned before, which from my perspective I'd never been warned. They have my email.
Just thought some people might be surprised that the retaliation was not criminal, and at best results in injunctions, fines, civil liability, etc.
Because I didn't word it better, I find myself in the odd position of arguing with people who probably share my high level opinion on the matter.
http://www.sgrlaw.com/ttl-articles/826/
Words are defined by how people use them, and this fits the common usage of the word illegal.
Nobody cares what pedantic definition a lawyer would use to describe this, because nobody made lawyers the language police.
But this goes off the rails on the next part. On one hand, you have a company presumably following the legal process[1] of getting through a harassment accusation being accused of a "cover up" in order to implicitly draw an equivalence with a company that apparently had a policy of shielding specific employees from harassment claims.
[1] I have no first-hand knowledge of the situation, but haven't seen any suggestions of impropriety.
http://gizmodo.com/former-google-engineer-blasts-companys-hr...
According to multiple sources and internal notes read to me, after discussing the claims of an alleged encounter between Singhal and a female employee first with former Google HR head Laszlo Bock and also Google CEO Sundar Pichai in late 2015, he denied those claims at the time. He also apparently stated a number of times that there were two sides to every story.
A former Google employee I spoke to has described the search giant’s HR as “a nasty mess.” They are not alone. Monday afternoon, former Google engineer Kelly Ellis shared some of her own experiences with at the company in light of the news surrounding Singhal’s departure. Ellis previously tweeted about sexual harassment she faced at Google back in 2015.
Sounds eerily familiar. My point being the exact same as what I said. Uber isn't right for letting this happen, but companies like Google have allowed this to happen, you just don't hear about it.
That said, your bias against Uber is blinding you.