There shouldn't be a "process" set by Google when it comes to sexual harassment, employees should be able to sue, that's the process,sexual harassment is a crime, they can't sue because Google force them into arbitration, which should be illegal for an employer to do that to an employee IMHO. this is a denial of justice.
A lot stuff that counts as sexual harassment in the work place is not a crime.
You don't sue people who perpetrate crimes, you prosecute them. You're asking the victims of sexual harassment to persuade police to investigate and prosecutors to prosecute, and we know that they won't because we know they already don't.
You're also saying that no action can be taken without meeting the very high criminal burden of proof - that this thing happened beyond all reasonable doubt. That's going to leave harassers free to continue.
Maybe you just meant that sexual harassment is unlawful and employees have an existing remedy through civil courts, but this would be pisspoor management. If your company employs people who reduce productivity of others in the workforce by sexually harassing them it's in the organisation's best interest to manage those people so they stop the harassment or leave the company.
Yet common bullying and generally abusive workplaces are completely legal in California. You have the right to quit anytime, not much else.
They aren't covered by special, workplace-specific laws; there are, however generally-applicable civil laws that apply to them.
However, obviously if things do escalate, access to the law should be guaranteed and the binding arbitration should clearly be dropped.
What seems to be suggested to fight it are tools that would be extremely effective against other junior employees (even if the allegations are untrue), but only middlingly effective against the real problem of powerful employees.
That will understandably lead to push back from junior employees who fear abuse. Offer solutions which would primarily work against powerful employees and would be ineffective against other junior employees and I think there would be much more support.
Except that, under the law, the company’s response (including the absence or inadequacy of any process) to certain situations is part of what determines if they are sexual harassment.
> sexual harassment is a crime
No, it's not, and if it were the process would not be for employees to sue, because crimes are prosecuted exclusively by the government in the U.S. legal system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_(Amendment)_Act,_...
also: some types of sexual harassment that are not crimes in the US are crimes in India.
I like your argument that it is cheaper to just let people rob me blind and then burn time and energy catching them, prosecuting time, and hoping for a conviction as a deterrent.
With any luck using your system crime will magically disappear on it’s own.
I am going to put my fingers in my ears now and make noises and ignore the worlds problems. It is certainly easier to not take responsibility. Good advice.
I agree that assaulters need to take responsibility for their actions. However, when they don't, the law needs to be there to protect the victims.
What we were talking about is ending forced arbitration (the "process" referred to by the person you responded to) so that the law can be used to protect victims. That doesn't mean protections at work suddenly go away. It also doesn't mean suddenly employers will let sexual harassment run rampant either. It's not a binary either-or choice at all. So why not all protections.
"employees should be able to sue, that's the process,sexual harassment is a crime, they can't sue because Google force them into arbitration,"
Notwithstanding the unbelievable confusion of law in that post is a whole other conversation.
I argued that companies should also have a plan in place to prevent sexual harassment at work by using an analogy to robbery, also a crime, that we use preventative measures to stop despite there being a criminal system punishing robbery.
Your response was claiming I was expressing poor judgment for arguing that companies are responsible for not creating environments rife for sexual harassment.
"Comparing sexual assault to a store robbery in a tone of sarcasm is at best a poor judgement call."
I don't agree. I think it's a reasonable demonstration of the absurdity of the position I'm replying to.
I don't know what else you wrote, but that's what I replied to.
Sorry, but if you're still going to stick on this point then this'll be the last thing I say on the matter.
I don't understand how this is even acceptable.
"Sue it out" is probably the least effective possible conflict resolution mechanism along almost any axis.
The underlying goal of arbitration is to ensure effective resolution of non-complex situations and reserve the courts for actually complex cases, instead of now, where they are used because people hope they can make a bunch of money.
The only thing I'm aware of is people complain of bias of arbitrators using the proxy of how often business wins relative to people in courts (with no evaluation of whether people should be winning as much as they do in court).
Otherwise I have seen nothing that suggests that arbitration is not in fact very effective and efficient at reducing the cost and time involved.
- it prevents class-action lawsuits
- it is funded typically by the company, and is very likely to agree with the company
Maybe suing constantly is an american thing, but if that is to be addressed it should be by congress not by individual companies wanting to circumvent civil law.
Also, there exist the concept of a so-called "unconscionable contract." I'm not saying this proposition is true, but I'm submitting for evaluation: is the act of submitting to private investigation processes that may be used as evidence against you in civil or criminal courts unconscionable?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude_in_the_...
There may be a very small number of cases where an employee successfully negotiated against this clause, but it probably requires the candidate to be a true outlier in terms of talent and skill set for the company to even consider it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_VL4gqrCHc&t=392
But if they did that, they be giving up control over their careers and the right to deal with their problems with their supervisors, one on one. /s
Because, Google is a company that builds products. I am interested in their products and in the fact that their products work, not much in the behaviour of the people building them- given the fact that they are located in a supposedly civilized country anyway, where serious misconducts should be prosecuted by law. The internal squabbles and complaints of the company are of very little relevance for their users, as it should be.
Because I'm a bit annoyed by what seems to me a growing push towards confusing the judgement of someone's work with their moral qualities. I see it as fundamentally anti-intellectual, as it strives to bring extraneous criteria in the evaluation of what should stand and be judged on its own. A scientific theory or a work of art aren't less valuable because their authors or proponents are or aren't communists, or arians; a literary masterpiece isn't diminished by the fact that its author was an anti-semite, or sadist; a great movie director remains a great director even if she did horrible things in her private life. Very little of our past science and philosophy and arts would still be standing if we were to apply these criteria, and I very strongly doubt we'd gain something better. Every single time "political" criteria have been used to judge the value of intellectual products, it's been the indicator of serious troubles, both for the society doing it and for the overall quality of the disciplines.
- Those who care about influencing their culture and want to do what they can to change it.
- Those who are concerned with where their money goes and whether or not they think that that is the most effective use of their money.
Feel free to ignore the concerns of those groups and do what you want. But I don't think that wading into a conversation you fundamentally don't want to be a part of is effective.
I was replying to a comment that claimed that
"no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office [..] would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable"
This to me is clearly a confusion between two completely different things: what Google produces, and what are Google's internal ethics. iPhones are not worse products because working with Steve Jobs was a nightmare. I value the distinction.
The ethics of science does exactly this. A common question which has been asked for much of the 20th Century is: should we use scientific results that are the product of non-consensual human experimentation. an extreme but often used example experiments that were carried out by the Nazis at concentration camps. Outside of science consider the debate over the works of Wagner [0], Knut Hamson [1], or Heidegger [2]. Ethics matters when judging intellectual output. For
These are fundamental questions of ethics which have a long intellectual history of debate and discussion. You are welcome to hold your own opinions on them, but I don't think the way in which you are framing the debate is helpful, e.g. "a growing push", "confusing the judgement", "fundamentally anti-intellectual", etc... Ethical questions which have received this much thoughtful discussion and examination should be treated with respect.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_controversies
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/books/28hams.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger_and_Nazism#Th...