Shareholders Sue Alphabet's Board For Role In Allegedly Covering Up Sexual Misconduct By Senior Execs (cnbc.com) 128
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Attorneys in San Francisco representing an Alphabet shareholder are suing the board of directors for allegedly covering up sexual misconduct claims against top executives. The suit comes months after an explosive New York Times report detailed how Google shielded executives accused of sexual misconduct, either by keeping them on staff or allowing them amicable departures. For example, Google reportedly paid Android leader Andy Rubin a $90 million exit package, despite asking for his resignation after finding sexual misconduct claims against him credible.
The new lawsuit, filed in California's San Mateo County, asserts claims for breach of fiduciary duty, abuse of control, unjust enrichment, and waste of corporate assets. The attorneys say the lawsuit is the result of "an extensive original investigation into non-public evidence" and produced copies of internal Google minutes from board of directors meetings. "The Directors' wrongful conduct allowed the illegal conduct to proliferate and continue," the suit reads. "As such, members of Alphabet's Board were knowing and direct enablers of the sexual harassment and discrimination."
The new lawsuit, filed in California's San Mateo County, asserts claims for breach of fiduciary duty, abuse of control, unjust enrichment, and waste of corporate assets. The attorneys say the lawsuit is the result of "an extensive original investigation into non-public evidence" and produced copies of internal Google minutes from board of directors meetings. "The Directors' wrongful conduct allowed the illegal conduct to proliferate and continue," the suit reads. "As such, members of Alphabet's Board were knowing and direct enablers of the sexual harassment and discrimination."
Re: Wait... (Score:3, Interesting)
Real afaik. In the case of Rubin he was getting sexual favors from a female under his supervision and she had trouble getting out of the situation. I know that during my time at Google both Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt had multiple extra-marital affairs with employees or contractors (guess how they got the contracts). Apparently Page also joined the club, because if everyone around him is doing it, why not him. Rubin was asked to leave the company because an employee started complaining about the situation
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And then they try to virtue signal by firing that autistic guy for writing that naive memo...despicable.
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Every time Sergei was found out, the whole company got sent to Harassment training. HR couldn't send execs, but they could send the peons. One year it was 5 times.
Incentives (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean all this time people could sue over senior management committing "breach of fiduciary duty, abuse of control, unjust enrichment, and waste of corporate assets"?
For most of them that's the only reason they wanted those jobs in the first place.
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Re:How does this happen? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a low-level peon I fall to understand how this happens. How do you get a contract signed at hiring that says "if I leave or am fired for misconduct you must give me a parachute of $500,000"?
It's not that hard for the founders and early hires.
One of the risks of a startup is that, after you've worked for them a while, they get merged, and the new guys fire the old ones - often before their stock options have all vested. The employee loses the prize he helped create and the value reverts to the company and/or the new owners. There are lots of variations on this (internal shakeups and office politics, companies buying and killing their upstart competition, etc.)
This makes the potential employee leery. To get him to sign, the contract may have clauses to prevent that, such as immediate vesting if the company is acquired, an extra year's vesting if he's laid off or fired before his options vest, etc. If one company offers this and another doesn't, guess which he joins.
But if (as they often used to) the contract DOESN'T hand out the goodies if he's fired "for cause", it gives the employer an incentive to claim misconduct and hold on to the goodies by faking cause. Then the employee is not just out the goodies but also gets an undeserved black mark on his job history. Oops! So again, in the hire-the-good-talent race, contracts have evolved so there is either a no-fault get-the-goodies-when-canned clause, or the bad conduct exception has to be something like a provable major sin against the company.
Thus it's common to have contracts where, if somebody gets dumped because of an external accusation that makes them a bigger liability than their work makes them an asset, it may result in a dismissal with, not just all the benefits earned so far, but triggering a "we fired you early" bonus.
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Spot on. I managed to negotiate such a thing as employee #1. Still left on my own volition because things were turning to shit though. :-)
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That may all be t rue. It makes me think however that the society where all these tricks are necessary is on a wrong path.
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Those "we fired you early" clauses are called "retention bonuses. They're also a form of "golden parachute".
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As a low-level peon I fall to understand how this happens. How do you get a contract signed at hiring that says "if I leave or am fired for misconduct you must give me a parachute of $500,000"?
In 2005, Google bought Android from Andy Rubin for 50 million dollars. Andy Rubin was at the helm of Android until December 2012 (basically, Android had already taken over the World by then).
In 2016, an Oracle lawyer leaked court documents that said that Google had made 22 billion dollars in profit from the Android operating system.
So you do the math.
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As a low-level peon I fall to understand how this happens. How do you get a contract signed at hiring that says "if I leave or am fired for misconduct you must give me a parachute of $500,000"?
In 2005, Google bought Android from Andy Rubin for 50 million dollars. Andy Rubin was at the helm of Android until December 2012 (basically, Android had already taken over the World by then).
In 2016, an Oracle lawyer leaked court documents that said that Google had made 22 billion dollars in profit from the Android operating system.
So you do the math.
I don't see much of an issue with this.
$50 Million is enough money to live very comfortably. If it's possible to get 1% interest on it, that's half a million dollars per year without earning another dollar otherwise. $50 million may not be Walton money, but it's still far more than the majority of programmers will earn over the course of a career. Sure, he would probably end up keeping only $30M after taxes and lawyers, but it's still "never work again" money.
Now, the argument here is that it's 0.002% of wh
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$50 Million is enough money to live very comfortably.
Andy Ruben didn't get the $50 million, his company did. He had to split it with the rest of the investors, workers, etc.
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Executives are capitalism's royalty, they live under special rules for the nobility rather than the iron law of wages like us peasants, it's that simple.
But above all... (Score:2)
"Do no evil"
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There you go! There was the loophole. You can do evil as long as you not acually are evil. I mean, who thinks "hey, I'm evil". No one. So, they leave the door open for any action as long as they don't self-identify as evil they're ok.
Humans are sexual creatures (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: Humans are sexual creatures (Score:2)
We have yet to figure out how to make corporate management act morally and responsibly. But expecting regular working class shmucks to be able to without help makes sense to you??? How about we acknowledge human nature and design our working environments around that? Does that really sound so bad?
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We have yet to figure out how to make corporate management act morally and responsibly. But expecting regular working class shmucks to be able to without help makes sense to you???
It should be much easier to get moral and responsible action from regular working class schmucks than a bunch of debauched psychopaths who have never had to take responsibility for their actions and can easily escape accountability in the future.
How about we acknowledge human nature and design our working environments around that? Does that really sound so bad?
Nonsense. If we acknowledge and accommodate human nature (by allowing sexual harassment in the workplace? Or allowing unrestrained sexism to create men's-only workplaces?) then we might as well legalize every horror we can imagine. We have laws because we want to li
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GameboyRMH is essentially insisting on denying reality because he doesn't like the consequences of admitting the truth. He says so himself. What strange religous belief system causes him to openly deny reality I don't know, but it appears to be one hell of a drug.
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So "acknowledging and accommodating" human nature to you means either allowing sexual harrassment in the workplace, or allowing unrestrained sexism? You have such a small imagination. There's an entire kaliedescope of options beyond the current anti-scientific Liberal mindsent that humans are simply genderless robots ready to be programmed with the latest newspeak.
By your own admission, you prefer denying the truth of human nature because you imagine bad consequences. The failure is your imagination.
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Enlighten me on some options then. I'm not denying the truth of human nature, I just think humans should be restrained from acting on the darker parts of human nature.
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The Mail is a right wing oriented new outlet, in much the same way the Guardian is a left oriented one.
I've caught both in serious errors and propaganda. And I've also seen valid articles in both that wouldn't appear in mags of the opposing political stance (as it would 'disrupt' their message).
That tired old "I'm the only independent thinker" is classic NPC rhetoric. It takes more than a very left wing view to be an "independent thinker".
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Wow! What an amazingly legitimate source you've cited I'm the Daily Mail! Beyond that here's another bunch of hambeast Slashdot "independent thinkers"" crying about all of those SJWs and jacking each other off for it. Snooooooooooooooooze.
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Based on your sig, it seems kinda obvious why you've 'seen it more'. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug!
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Classic "Appeal to Utopia" logical fallacy, and also appeal to extremes. Mankind is a sexual animal.
The amount of responsible people I've seen go into not-so-responsible behaviour due to temptation of one kind or another is spectacular.
You're assuming that everyone is perfectly incorruptible and perfectly un-temptable, and to be something else is somehow to be sub-human.
It's actually the natural state. Being that perfect paragon is the extreme exception.
I spend a lot of time avoiding paths that could lead
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The load of crap is people like you that blame men because women throw themselves at them. I doubt these women groupies at Google were unwilling participants.
Every man, or boy aged 16+, of status, money, or fame such as rock stars, hiphop stars, famous actors, sports stars, or just the local handsome hunk can go anywhere and can have their daily choice, if they so desire, from dozens or hundreds of willing women that throw themselves at these me. You can find endless examples of 80+ year old rich guys wi
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Humans are also creatures that eat. The desire to eat it way stronger tha nthe desire to have sex. If you put humans around a souce of food, they will start killing and eating it. o eally we should expect owrkplae cannibalism.
Or we should expect people to exert some self control. We'e not talking about someone starved of resouces here either. It'a guy woth 300,000,000. If he's that desperate for sex, he couls always wait until the end of the day and go hire a sex worker.
But no, you'e just an apologist. Clea
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[list of things that apparently liberals say everyone is intitled to excluding sex]
None of those things, just like sex, ae things you can simply take without consent. You don't get ot eat some food just becuase you like it if it's not yours. So kinda just like sex really.
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If my colleagues try to eat me, this would hurt me, and I would strenuously object. So they don't do it. This is encoded both into our explicit regulations and our implicit cultural practices.
If my colleagues flirt with me, this doesn't hurt me. It doesn't help me either - I'm in a committed relationship - but my colleagues don't all know that. So occasionally some of them have flirted with me, following our cultural practice that flirting with someone is a reasonable thing to do. And, following the sa
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But no, you'e just an apologist. Clearly you don't think it's important becuase you're talking about "flirting and microaggeaaions". You have never bothered to read about what happened because you clearly don't think this is fundamantally important and it's all more or less equivalent.
Do we know that more than that happened? "Credible" just means that you got somebody to believe it. I read the article and I don't see any proof mentioned.
There's a reason that legal protections exist, in civilization. Has he been charged with sexual crimes and convicted?
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Do we know that more than that happened
You missed the point (intentionally I suspect, because I've spoken to you before and you are exactly the same kind of apologist). This is about him equation serious misconduct to flirting as a generally equivalent thing, because he wants to downplay the importance of serious harassment.
It's irrelevant for that discussion and my point whether the comparison is for the purposes of an accusation or an event. It's the comparison that's the problem.
Has he been charged with
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The line between flirting and serious sexual misconduct has already been blurred. By people wanting greater excuse to complain and leverage it as a tool of power.
Serious sexual misconduct used to be pretty much just shy of rape. And almost universally, it was something that people would rally against.
Now it's become "they brushed against me, and I can find advantage in claiming sexual assault". By dilution of the meaning, you have a corresponding decrease in the reaction of sizable quantities of the popu
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Not especially paranoid, i just watch the way things are playing out.
For court cases, I'd pretty much agree that the evidence base would rule out most of the spurious claims. But alas these days, the very mention of misdeed is enough to end someone's career (and there are swathes of the population who are pretty much neo-puritannical).
I tend to withhold judgement until I get enough out of something to make a judgement. If I can't, and your anecdote is a tough one, then I mark it as something to keep under
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The line between flirting and serious sexual misconduct has already been blurred.
No, that's one of those things that's so wide of the mark that it's not even wrong.
For almost everything there is a smooth continuum between something that's absolutely fine and something that's absolutely not.
You'e pretending it's something new in order to parlay "some cases are bordeline" into "eveything's borderline" which is utter bullshit.
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You really don't get biological imperatives, do you?
Or the vagaries of human interaction. You treat sex as if it's interchangable. In which case, nobody would ever choose monogamy, as it'd be just as suitable to engage with the next mate that showed up.
You're also making the assumption that initial advances were made by the man. That in itself is a flaw in your logic.
The fact is that nobody apart from the original pair involved, are likely to know what really happened. And perhaps not even those two, as
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You really don't get biological imperatives, do you? Or the vagaries of human interaction.
No I do, I'm just not a massively entitled asshat.
You treat sex as if it's interchangable.
It's not and that's tough on you. No, you don't get to have sex with whomever you like simply because sex is not 100% interchangable. Not only that but no you don' get to pursue it as you like just because it's not interchangable.
You're also making the assumption that initial advances were made by the man.
No I'm not. This is just
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You can't fire someone for "credible" information (Score:2)
Even in civil matters you still need preponderance of evidence.
We don't yet burn the witch on the say so of another.
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I really, really wish we didn't metaphorically burn the witch on the say so of another. It seems that this is still a popular path in today's society.
Gad Saad said it best on Joe Rogan (Score:2)
Joe Rogan Experience #1218 - Gad Saad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]