Saturday, February 17, 2018

The Truth May Set You Free . . .

But it can get you fired by Google: ‘Advancing Gender Stereotypes’: You Can Be Fired for Telling the Truth, Feds Rule
Update on the Google gulag case:
Former Google engineer James Damore has attempted to take civil and legal action against his former employer after being fired in August, but on Thursday, a federal memo revealed that one of Damore’s filings has been unequivocally denied.
The National Labor Relations Board published its memo this week, which was issued in January after Damore filed a charge against his former employer on August 8. In spite of Damore withdrawing his NLRB filing in September, the board proceeded to examine and issue its own ruling: Google “discharged [Damore] only for [his] unprotected conduct while it explicitly affirmed [his] right to engage in protected conduct.” The NLRB emphasized that any charge filed by Damore on the matter should be “dismissed.”
In explaining the board’s reasoning, NLRB member Jayme Sophir points to two specific parts of the controversial memo circulated by Damore in August: Damore’s claim that women are “more prone to ‘neuroticism,’ resulting in women experiencing higher anxiety and exhibiting lower tolerance for stress” and that “men demonstrate greater variance in IQ than women.” . . .
[Sophir] says that specific Damore statements were “discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding [his] effort to cloak [his] comments with ‘scientific’ references and analysis, and notwithstanding [his] ‘not all women’ disclaimers. Moreover, those statements were likely to cause serious dissension and disruption in the workplace.”
The NLRB memo also includes a quote from Google’s letter of termination given to Damore in August, which Sophir says focused specifically on offending, fireable content while also protecting other portions of his speech:
I want to make clear that our decision is based solely on the part of your post that generalizes and advances stereotypes about women versus men. It is not based in any way on the portions of your post that discuss [the Employer’s] programs or trainings, or how [the Employer] can improve its inclusion of differing political views. Those are important points. I also want to be clear that this is not about you expressing yourself on political issues or having political views that are different than others at the company. Having a different political view is absolutely fine. Advancing gender stereotypes is not.
This is a distinction without a difference. When a company like Google enforces a policy of “diversity” that effectively mandates hiring and promotion on the basis of race and gender quotas, almost any criticism of these policies — indeed, even acknowledging that such a quota regime is being enforced — is likely to become grounds for termination. It is nonsense to assert that expressing “a different political view” is permissible, while in practice prohibiting internal criticism of the company’s personnel policies, when these policies reflect a particular “political view,” i.e., radical egalitarian “social justice” ideology.

Here we see the heart of the problem exposed by James Damore’s memo which, when read in its entirety, is a careful critique of the make-believe games people must play for the sake of “diversity” and “inclusion.” Civilized people are also courteous people, and a Harvard-educated science major like James Damore would probably not be so rude as to speak bluntly about the kind of tokenism one observes in a workplace where management has become obsessed with “diversity.”
Google set up it's structure to allow  this internal debate. The NLRB ought to be enforcing that it be administered fairly. We're headed for a society where "free speech" will be the speech allowed by GoogleFacebookTwitter. If we really value free speech, we need to be sure that it is not controlled by the  corporate leftists

No comments:

Post a Comment