If you saw a Google ad recently, know that it helped pay off one of its 'sex pest' execs $90m

If Google parent Alphabet thought its financial results for the third quarter of 2018 would result in a flood of positive coverage on Thursday, it was in for a disappointment. A slew of claims about execs sexually harassing staff stole headlines instead. Before he had the chance to announce (PDF) year-on-year revenue growth of …

[IceC0ld]

different rules

he pressured a woman he had worked with at Google, and had been romantically seeing, into performing oral sex on him in a hotel. He denied any wrongdoing

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just wow - SHE gets screwed and HE gets the pay off

from this moment forward to be known as - she got googled ........................

[ratfox]

Re: different rules

SHE gets screwed and HE gets the pay off

She got screwed and he got fired. The $90 millions was just the payment required to make him leave quietly without the $150 millions he had expected to receive over the next few years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: different rules

The $90 millions was just the payment required to make him leave quietly without the $150 millions he had expected to receive over the next few years.

So why would you want him to leave quietly and with enough money to take up sailing for the rest of his life? Ah yes, marketing. Can't tarnish whatever is left of their good name. That's basically kicking the victim in the shins once more.

[_LC_]

Re: different rules

Nope, it's essentially the same.

[LucreLout]

Re: different rules

That's basically kicking the victim in the shins once more.

It's also sparing "the victim" and the company from what would otherwise be an inevitable trial at which facts would be established and proven, or they wouldn't. If you want to sack someone on another persons say so, you're going to need evidence to back that up, which given the nature of the cases under discussion, may be very difficult to obtain. Presumably if there was sufficient evidence, the perpetrator would have been arrested, tried, and found guilty; dismissal without recompense them becomes easy to achieve.

Where there really isn't any objective evidence, just two parties with differing verions of events, the avoidance of a trial is less bad PR for the company, less traumatic for the accuser, and produces a defined outcome that all parties can live with. It's also a lot cheaper in terms of lawyers - tens or hundreds of millions at stake will tend to produce legal teams at the higher end of the billing spectrum.

[jmch]

Re: different rules

"The $90 millions was just the payment required to make him leave quietly without the $150 millions he had expected to receive over the next few years."

For the 'rank-and-file' of any company, any type of gross misconduct will result in immediate dismissal. Gross incompetence also usually results in eventual dismissal. In either case if there's a notice period I guess it's legally required to be paid, but surely any bonuses are out of the question.

It's absolutely baffling that executives get away with that sort of golden parachute when dismissed. What type of dirt does he have on Google that would justify Google paying him $90Mil to quietly walk away instead of having security escort him from the premises carrying a cardboard box with his belongings? Or are Google's lawyers so incompetent that they can't draw up a contract that protects Google from the excesses of its' top executives? Or is this behaviour so par-for-the-course for top executives that golden parachute payments for being caught are already negotiated up front?

The mind boggles

[Jay Lenovo]

Re: different rules

Apparently Google believes inappropriately acquired oral servicing costs, (150-90) 60 million.

For lesser employees (like the other 48), if you can't pay that amount, I guess you just get fired.

[}{amis}{]

Re: different rules

Putting a new and icky spin on Scroogled!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: different rules

So why would you want him to leave quietly and with enough money to take up sailing for the rest of his life? Ah yes, marketing.

Yes, but not only. No company wants a wrongful termination lawsuit from an employee fired for alleged sexual harassment, which is going to last months, drag the victim of harassment in the proceedings, and may ultimately end up in the employee getting back the job when the jury somehow decides the harassment has not been proved "beyond reasonable doubt".

[onefang]

All the recent Google ads I have seen recently have been in Russian, a language I can't read. Google seems to have misplaced me. So I have no idea if they where advertising new ways to get sexually molested by their execs. I'd pass them through Google Translate, but I have no idea what new unreadable language I'll get when I ask for English.

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple of things troubling about this.

"He added that Google now has tools to handle harassment reports"

Does that mean they didn't take these things seriously before?

Also, these are reported cases, how many have been cleared up with "hush"money?

Don't be evil my arse.

[John Hawkins]

Google obviously has a lot of 'tools' at least, in multiple senses of the word (though the specifics of those senses might depend on where and when you learnt English).

[Adrian 4]

It means they now have an automatic process for accepting such reports. Like complaints about their 'products', it acknowledges and then ignores them.

[wolfetone]

Here's me playing the lottery like a chump.

All I need to do instead is work my way up to a position of power at Google, smack a colleague on the arse, get a few million in a pay out to go away and shut up.

[Pascal Monett]

"the advertising giant has terminated 48 of its 85,000 employees for harassment"

That is an absolutely meaningless comparison, 85k employees are not capable of harassment. If the quote had been about terminating 48 out of 100 sexual-harassment-accused employees, then it would be meaningful.

It would also be admitting that Google had 100 employees (managers) accused of sexual harassment, which would inevitably open Google to a tsunami of bad press. Whether 48 terminations is a good result or not actually cannot be judged without knowing the specifics of all the accusations (being accused doesn't mean you're guilty, in an ideal world).

So yeah, Google isn't about to admit how many cases it has actually handled (much less how many cases it has ignored), but even so, comparing the number of terminations to the number of managers would have, apparently, been a little bit closer to the mark.

[diodesign]

Re:"That is an absolutely meaningless comparison"

No, it's quite obviously not - it's for context. Compare a company kicking out 48 of 300 employees versus 48 out of 85,000. It gives you an idea of how many people, as a percentage of the workforce, were booted out.

F'king hell. I know it's Friday, but that's no excuse for leaving your common sense in the glovebox after parking your car in the office parking lot ;-)

C.

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

Re: That is an absolutely meaningless comparison"

so thats 0.06%

is that good, bad , average?

is there a quota?

Hows that compare with oracle and MS?

[Hstubbe]

And do we think anyone at the receiving end of those billions give a shit about sexual harrassment or the bad press? Unlikely, the billions keep coming anyway.

[Antonius_Prime]

Get Thee a Pi-Hole and deny The Chocolate Factory some revenue...

In one week, it's blocked 20% of the traffic in my little home network of myself, the other half's mobes and a half dozen connected devices (tablets, PC's - No truck with "Smart" TV's). 20% of that traffic was all advert requests.

Not bad for something that costs me around €0.05 a month to run...

[Version 1.0]

SNAFU again

Google's just another company - you see this sort of thing with all the really wealthy companies and it's nothing new, it's been going on for years. Corporate reality is simply following normally acceptable actions in society - politicians do it, neighbors do it, and corporations are "people" too these days.

[User McUser]

FIFY

Pichar tried to assure folks that [the] company “deeply cares about Chinese users['s money],”