“UnGoogley”? Worker says she was fired for questioning no holiday pay

> Also my condolences to this woman if her parents named her Tuesday.

Tuesday Carne, I think it's a play on Taco Tuesday?

There was a famous actress with that as a stage name: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001839/

One thing I very much appreciate about the hacker news community are comments like this.

I didn’t read the article but clicked in of the comments “knowing” they be stuffed with Reddit like fury. “How dare they!”

I was wrong… Like usual.

It seems this community is significantly less jump-to-outrage prone than many others (eg. much of Reddit).

We still let the marketing-engineered clickbait headlines slip through (since they are the actual articles’ titles) - such as the title of this post.

But still, some of the least outrage-y responses on the internet.

Thank you Reonxi and thank you HN community.

Edit: spelling (more bloody autocorrect fails)

Tuesday Carne is certainly a distracting pseudonym. Carne means meat in Spanish.

Replace it with Sausage to get an idea about how it affects my mind, and why you should be careful about what you draw attention to.

##The worker, Saturday Sausage, worked for a Google subcontractor called Modis in South Carolina. At a meeting Nov. 17, managers told her and others they had to work the holiday without any extra pay, Sausage says. I spoke with Sausage, and she said, “The only thing in my mind that I thought could be against the rules is that I said, ‘That’s bull**’.” Google employees’ Alphabet Workers Union is helping Sausage file paperwork with the feds.

Edit: I live in a third world country and not all Holidays are the same. Some are ALWAYS paid in full (workers earn twice as much if they work during the holiday, and thrice as much if the holiday was sunday free day), some are optional (the worker may ask the day off without pay) some are irrelevant (they aren't Holidays for the worker) Holidays are appointed by a government as a way to gain popularity. They are costly for employers.

I'm reminded of all the Youtube and lost account disputes brought here; we hear about these things because there's no other working dispute process.

> my condolences to this woman if her parents named her Tuesday.

At least it wasn't My Girl Friday.

Let’s not pick on people’s names here. It’s not relevant and most often the person didn’t choose their name.

Also, January Jones is a fine actress. See her in Mad Men if you haven’t already.

There is also mention of another person in the same datacenter being fired for talking about unions on social media -- who knows if that's a Google contractor as well.

Regardless, I think this is a bit of a strong reaction to what amounts to a light "human interest meets tech" collection of tiny stories. It includes as much detail about a spat over tweets, and a rescue dog's story being sold as an NFT (...), as it does this worker's story. It's pure fluff and it wears that on its sleeve.

Please don't cross into personal attack. It's not in the spirit of the site, and you can make your substantive points without it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You are reading this article for free on the internet. Provided that his employer is OK with it, he can do whatever he wants.

you are obviously unfamiliar with the examiner

I don’t think this tweet is the original source, but it was the only source I could find. https://mobile.twitter.com/ryanafournier/status/108776604858...

> The news used to tell you that something happened, then you had to decide what you thought about it.

> Now the news tells you how to think about something, and you have to decided if it even happened.

> State the facts; I don't care about your opinion.

I believe it was a young Edward R Murrow who submitted copy to his editor who later returned it, saying, "Cut the sauce, Murrow!"

Finding something palatable to read these days is quite the struggle.

Have you ever read a newspaper? Newspapers are full of op-eds, commentary, and opinion.

Some quality newspapers will separate the two, having a section for reporting facts, and a section for opinions, but many papers don't have this strict distinction.

And to be honest, the fact that some Google subcontractor fired an employee isn't really the kind of world-shattering news that warrants a strictly fact based objective news article that everyone must read about. It's just not important enough. You can however use it as a hook for an opinion piece, like this reporter has done.

Thank you. I totally agree. It's absolutely exhausting to read journalism which is endlessly hammering you with the value judgements you're meant to make. Just give me the facts, and I can do the opinions myself.

It also should be immediately obvious that this is one person's story, with no information from the other side, amongst tens of thousands of employees.

Depends. In other reports, she has admitted that they way she questioned the policy was by cussing out her supervisor. She had been on the job for less than two weeks.

Given those additional facts, I don't have very much sympathy for her position.

It's entirely dumb. She was fired by the company she contracted for, not by Google. No Google employee had any involvement in that decision. The sole reason that the word 'Google' is attached to this article - and to her complaints - is because it generates more publicity.

It's also very unclear where the "unGoogley" wording comes from. The article doesn't directly attribute it to anyone in her company, much less in Google, though it does everything else it possibly can to insinuate that one of her overlings said it. My hunch is that the quote is actually from her.

Yes, in Canada you are paid double time for Statutory holidays.

Every salaried, or more specifically, except job I have had came with paid time off for holidays and every hourly, or non exempt job has had holiday time and a half or double time for holiday work. In some states, it’s even a legal requirement.

> Do people typically get paid more for working on holidays?

Yes, of course.

But It depends on the type of job contract. A physician that must remain in the hospital in Christmas Eve to deal with a ton of drunken people is paid more. A tow truck driver is expected to be available at any time or day and can be paid the same. Their work has a different concept of what is extra time, and a researcher passing the night in the university just wouldn't be paid for that.

If you’re hourly Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter are typically paid the same as overtime. Pretty sure there is (or at least used to be) something legal attached to it as we used to get time and a half when I waited tables. This was not used as incentive as the minimum for waiters was like half the federal minimum wage due to tips being the primary revenue source.

Time-and-a-half or double wages are common holiday pay in the US. They’re not required everywhere, though.

I only got paid extra when I worked in IT for the government. Not sure why people would expect extra pay though in a non-unionized, private sector job if it wasn’t part of the employment contract.

I ran a call center some years ago, and I would pay people double the hourly rate to work on holidays. I always saw it as the “not an asshole” thing to do. I also didn’t fire people for just bring up the question of their pay.

In virtually the entire developed world outside the US, holiday pay is a given. In some countries like Switzerland you literally need to apply to the government for permission to work Sundays.

Every union job I've had holiday pay, and every white collar job has paid time off for holidays.

In my life the only jobs that skipped holiday pay were hypercapitalist organizations that didn't have a unionized workforce and didn't compensate people for their time humanely.

Yeah, in most parts of the world national holidays are holidays because you don't have to work without worrying you won't be paid for that day. If you have a Bezos-like mindset, it may seems stupid and inefficient, but this is short-sighted. Having holidays where - irrespective of other PTO, which is very scarce in the USA - you can reunite with your family or just be alone if you prefer, spend time doing what you love etc, gives you the reason to go back to work. Otherwise, if you just work for the sake of working, what's the point? You just get older and die. Maybe if you're one of the lucky ones and have a job that gives you 100% satisfaction and inspiration all of the time, it might not matter that much, but most people don't have jobs like that, and even if it seems so, it may change with time. You Americans need to stand up and fight for your rights.