Apple worker says she was fired after leading movement against harassment | Hacker News Reader

Apple worker says she was fired after leading movement against harassment

reuters.com

16 pointspseudolus10 comments

Whenever I read stories like these, the first thing that goes through my mind is: No, the company did not fire you for that reason. As someone who has terminated employees in the past, the amount of time and effort companies put it into making sure never to fire someone unjustly is staggering. The stakes are even greater when it’s someone who’s an activist against harassment. It means Apple fully expected this to hit the media or courts, so there is zero room for getting it wrong.

I tend to agree. Especially in the case of activist employees, it always seems to be the employee has crossed a line from activism to harming the company.

While all such claims should be taken seriously, the issue remains that such statements are sometimes invented or exaggerated by people who recognise the damage they can cause. Everyone deserves the presumption of innocence, even evil mega corporations - because at the end of the day real abusers are able to hide in the noise that’s generated by those making disingenuous claims.

This is a common tactic in the political space: it’s the tactic of muddying the water with so many false claims that legitimate claims are just dismissed as rhetoric.

This is such a weak argument. It’s like responding to an airplane crash and saying ”No way that crash actually happened, I used to work in aviation, and the amount of work that goes into making sure airplanes never crash is staggering! It’s such a huge problem for the company if a plane crashes, so there is zero room for getting it wrong, it must be a fake news hoax!”

While everything states is true. We all know that airplanes do in fact crash, both due to human error and due to institutional errors.

Right, nobody here (unless an insider in the case) has a clue what is actually behind this, but that won't stop a lot of people projecting their assumptions on it and leaping to conclusions. Cases like this, certainly in the early stages before further details come out and likely even after that, are ideological Rorschach tests.

You analogy is poor. No one is saying she wasn’t fired, just that the reasons she was fired for were likely legitimate.

(Personally I would guess she got the attention of management through her activism, then they watched and waited for her to do something clearly against company policy so they had a good excuse to fire her. Whether that’s strictly legitimate or not, I don’t know. Maybe it will be settled in court.)

Disagree with this. I work at another FAANG. Firing is a long, painful, tedious process. Lots of checks in place along the way. If someone is fired, the odds that it happened for unjust reasons isn’t zero but close to it in my experience.

Firing in FAANGs is very thorough process as others have comments. The activist likely broke company protocol at some point, otherwise the company would be inviting a wrongful termination suit.

Something that is mostly unstated but widely understood is MeToo started as a good worthy and needed movement. Then people were dragged to the courts of public opinion never having been accused of any criminal misconduct, where the only apparent wrong doing was hurt feelings or making some feel uncomfortable. This turned MeToo from activist protest group in to a rogue militia twitter posse who is seeking out its next targets to drag through the muck. Unconfirmed and baseless accusations are deemed an acceptable part of their MO. If there was a self proclaimed MeToo activist leader in a company they would likely attract a lot of attention, both positive and negative.

Just as they have targeted others and they themselves have targets.

“Harassment”

Did someone mention that she was wearing a red dress or something?

I would like a more specific word as well. The lack of clarity to me implies it would have been a lie to claim a more substantial form of harassment. For example, if it were sexual harassment then say it was so. Otherwise, everyone gets harassed all the time. I'm technically harrassing you right now.

"Harassment" without specificity comes off to me as a desire to point fingers without the cause required to point it, otherwise I see this as just another boy who cried wolf.

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