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A dispute between The interest of Google and the two employees who helped organize a walkout last fall is stepping up after Google executives reportedly sent emails to colleagues at one of the women, disputing the badertion that she was demoted.
The two employees, Claire Stapleton and Meredith Whittaker, organized a Town Hall forum in New York on Friday, which was broadcast live to other Google offices. Participants stated that Stapleton had discussed e-mails sent to his colleagues and that employees had shared other alleged retaliation stories at Google.
In a statement Friday, Stapleton said that Google executives had tried to undermine it "in e-mails sent this week to thousands of my friends and colleagues" contesting Stapleton's claim that she would have been " demoted "because she had been rebadigned and had lost half of her employees. his direct reports; his initial role was restored after hiring a lawyer. Stapleton claimed that Google emails said that there had never been a demotion.
"What is true is that there was a demotion and that, once my lawyers were involved, the situation was reversed," Stapleton wrote in a statement viewed by WIRED. Earlier this week, Bloomberg announced that an unidentified Google employee had filed a lawsuit against Google with the National Labor Relations Board, due to retaliation, badigned to his New York office, where Whittaker is based and Stapleton.
In a statement, a spokesman for Google said, "We prohibit retaliation at the workplace and publicly share our policy very clearly. To avoid any complaints at Google, we give our employees several ways to report their problems, including anonymously, and to investigate any allegations of retaliation. The spokesperson did not respond to questions regarding the email contesting Stapleton's demotion application.
The two women have been working at Google for more than ten years. Whittaker, who runs Google Open Research and has been working at Google for 13 years, said Monday that he had been asked to give up his work on the ethics of AI, including his role at at the AI Now Institute, a group affiliated with New York University. Stapleton, a YouTube marketing executive who has been working for Google for almost 12 years, said that months after the restructuring of her role, she had lost half of her reports and that Google's human resources department had suggested her take sick leave while she was not sick. .
Although the two women helped organize the November protest, 20,000 Google employees briefly left their office to protest the company's handling of badual harbadment complaints, but their requests differ. Whittaker's allegations of retaliation appear to be related to his work on AI ethics, including the organization of protests last spring around the Pentagon's Project Maven, under which Google has applied artificial intelligence techniques to help identify objects in drone images, and a more recent protest against Google's external notice. advice on AI.
In a statement released on Friday, Whittaker said its director told him in late December that she should probably leave Google's Cloud division, where she had been working for years. She said the problem was "aggravated" in March, when the same official had told her that the Cloud division was looking for more revenue "and that Amnesty International and my work on the ethics of AI did not fit anymore. " She said the request was strange because Cloud Unity has a team working on ethical concerns related to AI.
At the March meeting, Whittaker claimed that his manager also told him that there were "two types of people at Google … those who quit and those who stay and hate every minute and try to destroy it. " Whittaker said, "I've been caught off guard because my job has always been to make Google respect its so-called values and treat its workforce, as well as the rest. of the world, with respect. "
The protest against Google's external advisory board focused on the appointment of Kay Cole James, president of the Heritage Foundation; employees were upset by James' anti-trans and anti-immigrant political statements. Google dissolved the board after nearly 2,600 employees signed a petition against James' participation.
In her statement on Friday, Whittaker stated that on April 1, a few days before the petition was written, she had obtained authorization from Jeff Dean, an artificial intelligence executive at Google, to move from Cloud to the Research group. and Machine Intelligence from Google. Two weeks after sending the petition, Whittaker claims that his transfer was killed.
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