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To be fair to google, hiring disabled people, bragging about it in DEI puff pieces, and then refusing to give us accommodations is practically a national pastime. Although this story is an amazingly egregious version of the same.
Reminder that reddit still hasn’t provided accessibility options that come even close what third party apps provided previously despite their app being out for almost 8 years.
Why anyone would expect anything different after Timnut Gebru is completely beyond me. I don’t want to victim shame. I am disappointed so many smart and talented people are so naive as to think Google won’t do that to them.
I get what you’re saying, but I feel like this and that are two different things.
I think there are plenty of smart people that understand that Google can and will do this sort of thing, but will also pay them a buttload of money.
Also, disabled people are so disadvantaged in the job market (and a disabled Black woman, whose job accommodation requires an interpreter, no less), that it’s not a question of naïveté. It’s a question of *paying the rent*.
(Per the BLS, “In 2023, 22.5 percent of people with a disability were employed–the highest recorded ratio
since comparable data were first collected in 2008.” Look, ma, an improvement!)I might not have explained myself well. Google didn’t want Gebru’s name on a paper that called out how Google’s products do not support DEI. When pressed, Google doubled down. Google has yet to provide a rational explanation that stands up to scrutiny. With this context, a smart person is going in expecting that if they’re a minority at Google they’re going to be sidelined or mistreated (like in the article).
To your point about going for pay, sure, absolutely. If you do that you don’t really have the ethical ground to complain about it because you’re taking advantage of Google. Explicitly going there to be abused to trigger a suit makes me uncomfortable again from ethical grounds. You’re also not naive here, which is not the group that concerns me. I feel like the woman in the article was naive (which doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve justice; it just means she should have expected this).
I also want to address the whole “you hate capitalism yet participate in” criticism that could come from this. Totally valid. To change a system you have to participate in it. You also have to know what you can change. If you’re anything below the top two or three tiers of power or are not willing to follow Google without question for years until you reach those echelons of power, you have no agency at Google (or any similar major corporation). You cannot change it and to believe so is naive. Take, for example, how Google effectively terminates union organizers with a slap on the wrist (if anything at all). Or look at Google’s explicit move to DoD contracts after pretending to care post Project Maven. Gebru is, again, a perfect example because Google leaders decided to shut down an industry leader.
In general I’m pretty vehemently anti-FAANG on ethical grounds and that colors a lot of my commentary. The only reason I can understand to go work at them is money or, if you’re a very select few, resources to solve interesting problems. If you choose to work at FAANG for those reasons and your reaction when something like this happens is anything other than surprise, I don’t know what you expected.
You’re not taking advantage of google to expect your rights under U.S. law to be upheld, and you have both an ethical and legal ground to complain about it.
Your argument boils down to:
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Google illegally and unethically discriminates against people from certain backgrounds.
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We all know about it.
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So if you get a job with a company that we know discriminates illegally, and then you make a fuss about it, you’re being unethical.
That’s not how any of this works.
“The only reason I can understand to go work at them is money”
Well, yes. That’s why all of us work anywhere.
You seemed to have missed my comment about naivety. If you don’t expect to be taken advantage of, you’re naive, not unethical. Life has lots of lessons to teach you. If you do know Google is unethical and you choose to go there and you choose to rightfully respond to Google breaking the law, that’s unethical. It’s right, sure, but it’s unethical. You know you’re going to sue them. That shouldn’t be the basis for making an employment decision. Again, totally the right thing to do, just a very greedy approach to everything.
As for your other comment, if money were the only factor in selecting a job, you would leave your job the second you were offered a cent more. If that’s how you work, that’s different from most other folks, who tend to consider a variety of factors. Changing jobs is a lot of work so there’s a minimum threshold. The company itself is also a huge factor that will change that threshold. What about a job that requires you to work 24/7?
Disabled people aren’t naive. We know we are going to encounter employment discrimination in every job we take. We still need to work, and if we cannot persuade an employer to act legally by the normal means (which in a non-union U.S. job is usually escalating from manager, to HR, to legal and public relations threats) then we will have to follow through with PR and legal battles. That is not unethical, and I honestly struggle to understand how you wrote those words.
Wow, I wasn’t aware that every employer in the world actively discriminated as much as Google does. I had no idea because there’s zero news coverage that you have zero options. You should get the word out!
If you are unaware that disabled employees face employment discrimination in every job, and that a disabled Black woman knows that she will face at least some discrimination in every job, and that Google – bad as they are – is not even on the same planet as “the worst”, then there is no word that will reach you, my smoking friend.
Jalon Hall is a Black disabled woman. There is a zero percent chance that she was naive about her odds of facing discrimination in the workplace. She knew perfectly well that she was going to face discrimination in the workplace. By your rule, her only two choices are “remain unemployed and starve” or “go work somewhere and be discriminated against in silence.”
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Thank you for taking the time to expand on your comment!
Paywall.
archive.is.
private and incognito windows.
wayback machine.note that scrolling is janky on this archived page, probably due to an invisible popup. tapping or clicking on the background of the page allowed me to scroll normally and read the entire article
