Google has had enough with workplace activism?

[Dill]

(04-24-2024, 07:35 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: I'm pretty sure that 15-20 years ago that the percentage of the population with the skills to be attractive to a company like Google represented a relatively small portion of the general population, which made the people working those jobs extremely valuable at the time. The volume of people with technical skills today is astronomical compared to the days when Google was making it's name. Now, they don't need to tolerate activist tantrums in the workplace, as people with tech skills are now (seemingly) a dime a dozen.

So the labor market favors the employer.  All the more reason to think carefully before defining worker protests from the Boss's perspective.

I'm still curious as to how this applies to reporters, who also have bosses.  The recent NYT incident over rape reporting was mentioned in your article.

(04-24-2024, 07:35 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: As to the bolded section, I'd say that those employees were likely looking to leverage their employer to steer support to one side of the issue in question. Apparently, Google has decided that information is a commodity for all people, and now that the power of algorithms has been exposed, doing such things as steering public opinion has more of a liability factor involved.  Furthermore, how would Google be "participating in genocide" simply by offering the same services to all people?

That's what I wondered, so I looked into it a bit more. 

Apparently the issue is that Google was selling something called "Project Nimbus" to the Israeli government and military,
which involved cloud computing and AI.  If that were used for management and surveillance of, say,
the population of the West Bank under military control, I can see why employees might want no part of that.

They were led by a group called "No Tech for Aparheid" which is also protesting Amazon.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-fires-workers-protest-israel-contract-project-nimbus-rcna148333
https://apnews.com/article/google-israel-protest-workers-gaza-palestinians-96d2871f1340cb84c953118b7ef88b3f