Tim Chevalier, a site reliability engineer from Google, was fired in November 2017 for denouncing racism and sexism at the company’s internals employee forums. Mr. Chevalier filed a lawsuit against Google, in which he explained the horrendous situation he faced for defending women, people of color and LGBTQ employees, after they were attacked on Google’s message boards.
Chevalier explained in the lawsuit that he used the same internal message system to respond the offensive messages the bullies had left, and to educate his employer as well as other workers. He advised some changes to the Google’s working conditions, claiming they needed to include and support minorities – like himself.
In the lawsuit, he stated the reason for the firing:
“Human Resources explicitly told Chevalier that Google was ending his employment because of his political statements in opposition to the discrimination, harassment, and white supremacy, he saw being expressed on Google’s internal messaging systems,” the lawsuit writes.
A cultural war inside Google
Some Google employees told USA Today, in January 2018, that the company was not doing enough to support and protect them from a “harassment campaign” – which targetted them as the objects of hateful comments and aggressive threats. These employees had volunteered before to increase the diversity of Google’s staff, since white and Asian men represent the most significant percentage of their workers.
During the summer of 2017, the group brought the diversity debate into the daylight when former Google engineer James Damore made public an important document. In the paper, he stated that the company’s attempts to enhance the diversity were misguided, noting that the biological difference between men and women was practically the only reason.
Damore was fired when Google became aware of the comments he made about women. He filed a lawsuit in January in which he charged the company with discrimination against white, conservative men. Then, another former engineer was also fired, and joined Damore claiming they both had to leave their jobs for their beliefs.
Does Google care?
The multinational company examined Mr. Chevalier after several responses he made to certain “conservative” comments were discovered. Google human resources found emails, memes and Google-Plus posts, that involved the man criticising Republicans “affiliating with people carrying torches and yelling: ‘you will not replace us’” during the Charlottesville rally in Virginia.
A spokeswoman for the company, Gina Scigliano, who addresses the significant cultural debate that should not be confused with licentiousness, explains:
“All employees acknowledge our code of conduct and other workplace policies. The overwhelming majority of our employees communicate in a way that is consistent with our policies. But when an employee does not, it is something we must take seriously. We always make our decision without any regard to the employee’s political views,” said Scigliano.
Source: USA Today