Alphabet top brass OK'd $100m-plus payouts to execs accused of sexual misconduct – court docs Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin allegedly signed off multimillion-dollar payouts to senior execs accused of sexual misconduct, according to freshly unsealed court submissions. The complaint (10.2MB PDF), which was published by the Santa Clara Superior Court's website yesterday, was filed in a case brought by …
De Castro failed at Yahoo, was fired after a year, and got a 58 million payoff. As per all these other executives, if there was evidence of gross misconduct they could have been fired without a payoff. But there wasn't that sort of evidence...so they had to be paid off.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ex-yahoo-coo-henrique-de-castro-i-was-fired-and-thats-ok-2014-12?r=US&IR=T
Even with concrete evidence, I suspect the payments would be made. There's the good ol' boys mentality in board rooms otherwise they wouldn't be sitting on a new board in a few weeks. And it's not just sexual harassment either. Bad decisions and companies failing are no barrier to getting a new board seat.
Maybe later we get the words "convicted"and "custodial sentence"
No criminal cases, so not going to happen. This is the problem of keeping this all on the civil side. Make it a criminal offence, once you've decided what this is, and not something stupid because unworkable like the current German law that consent is not given unless a woman says "yes", make disclosure obligatory oh, and by imposing custodial sentences you might be able to keep a lid on the tort side.
Aren't the key words here "allegedly" and "accused"?
Yes, because Alphabet/Google contractually forced all complaints through an internal arbitration process. I would have through that in any civilised country, not only would that contract term be illegal, but that the acts some of these people are being accused of are criminal acts in themselves. It seems that in the USA you can sign away your legal rights to a fair trial in an employment contract and it's all legal.
The civil actions taken against the company were required to go through arbitration.
The response to any criminal acts would not come under the employment contracts and appropriate criminal justice procedures followed.
It's possible for actions to be unacceptable in employment without breaking the law, so it's possible that nothing happened, that something happened that wasn't illegal but did justify removing the accused from the organisation, that something happened that wasn't illegal and didn't justify ending someone's employment but they were asked to leave anyway and that something happened and the police should've been called but weren't. It's even possible that the police were called and chose not to pursue a prosecution.
We don't know which scenario came to pass but in none of them has anybody signed away their right to a fair trial.
Well this is the 21st century. Don't need no court case or actual evidence.
Not saying these people are guilty or innocent, but just a whiff of an accusation is apparently career ending stuff these days.
Want someone's job, spread a quick rumour and they're out. Job done.
"But, anyone being innocent until proven guilty, how could Google fire someone being 'just' accused without compensation?"
Innocent until proven guilty is how the justice system is supposed to treat people. Private individuals are free to use very different standards if they so desire. It's entirely possible for a company to say something along the lines of "We don't care whether you actually did it or not, allegations bring us into disrepute so we want nothing further to do with you. Goodbye.". The exact extent to which that is possible depends on local laws of course; in the EU a simple accusation of misconduct might not be enough to avoid worker protection laws, while in the US it's often possible to just kick anyone out with no notice and no reason necessary. But in no case does "innocent until proven guilty" come into it; you don't need to wait for someone to get a criminal conviction in order to fire them.
This sentence in the New York Times article on the subject gave me food for thought:
A Google employee with whom [Andy Rubin] was having an extramarital relationship accused him of coercing her into oral sex. She filed a complaint, and the company’s investigation found her account to be credible.
I'm wondering what would have happened had the woman not been a Google employee. Nothing, I suspect.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
