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James Damore loses NLRB claim against Google

James Damore loses NLRB claim against Google

For now lesson is clear: SHUT UP if you want to keep your job in the uber-liberal high tech ideological echo chamber.

https://twitter.com/fired4truth?lang=en

James Damore is the former Google employee fired after he shared a memo addressing diversity issues at Google that was deemed not politically correct.

We covered the story in August 2017, Google Senior Engineer FIRED for diversity memo:

A Senior Software Engineer at Google wrote an internal memo questioning the assumption of discrimination as the explanation for why women are underrepresented in High Tech (which he defined as Software Engineering).

I noted that questioning the religious orthodoxy of diversity was dangerous to his career, Google Senior Engineer commits diversity heresy:

There is no religious doctrine as unassailable as the claim that differences in achievement in areas where women and/or racial/ethnic minorities are UNDERrepresented is caused by systemic sexism/racism etc.

That religious doctrine, however, never is applied to fields in which women and/or racial/ethnic minorities are OVERrepresented.

The claim that differences in outcome are caused by discrimination drives the “diversity” agenda on campuses and at companies. That one might support diversity as a goal, yet question whether the problem is systemic discrimination and whether MORE discrimination really is the answer, is considered heresy and is punishable by firing, harassment, and on campuses, being shouted down….

While the memo is being regularly described as “anti-diversity,” a plain reading of the document shows that is not accurate. The Senior Engineer does not question diversity as a goal, but does question the explanations given as to why it is not being achieved in High Tech….

… questioning the assumptions underlying diversity initiatives is so dangerous to employment — one stands at risk of being accused of violating company anti-discrimination policies merely by questioning whether there is in fact discrimination. That accusation could be a career ending. Which is why people just shut up.

This memo could be used as a launching point for an open and fact-based discussion of why some group succeed in the Software Engineering field (and some other high tech fields) more than others. If you can’t identify the actual problem, you can’t meaningfully discuss solutions.

I’m guessing that that Google Senior Engineer soon will be a former Google Senior Engineer, will be outed on the internet (he already has been, but I’m not using his name), will be mercilessly harassed and doxxed, and will be driven underground. Because that’s how diversity heretics are treated.

After his termination, Damore filed a Complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, which never made sense to me tactically. That NLRB Complaint was separate from a class action in which Damore is a named plaintiff.

The NLRB just rejected his claim, as The Washington Examiner reports:

The federal labor enforcement agency said James Damore’s memo was not protected speech as Damore claimed but rather constituted sexual harassment, so the company was right to fire him.

“The charging party’s use of stereotypes based on purported biological differences between women and men should not be treated differently than the types of conduct the board found unprotected in these cases,” wrote NLRB Associate General Counsel Jayme Sophir in a Jan. 16 advice memo recently made public. Sophir said the memo’s statements were “discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding effort to cloak comments with ‘scientific’ references and analysis, and notwithstanding ‘not all women’ disclaimers.”

On Jan. 23, the board officially agreed with Sophir’s conclusions.

The legal opinion on which the NLRB relied is embedded below.

I presume there is both and administrative and ultimately judicial review process (though I claim no expertise in NLRB matters).

Nonetheless, the lesson for now is clear:

Shut Up

(if you want to keep your job in the uber-liberal high tech ideological echo chamber)

And also shut up on campus, because Antifa doesn’t want Damore there either, as a student reports:

I belong to Freethinkers of Portland State University, a skeptic student group. On Saturday we’re hosting a panel on diversity featuring James Damore, the Google employee who was fired last July for writing a memo expressing heterodox views about sex disparities in the company’s workforce.
We expected controversy. But we also got danger. The left-wing newspaper Willamette Week published an article with a false and inflammatory headline: “Tech Bro Fired from Google for Saying Women Are Biologically Unfit to Be Engineers Will Speak at PSU Next Month.” The subheadline inaccurately attributed to Mr. Damore the view that “women can’t do math.”

Campus activists called us misogynists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis. A person claiming to work for campus audiovisual services tweeted that he could break into our event through a back entrance and “literally turn the whole building off.” There were threats of violence. A Facebook user—it’s not clear if he’s connected to PSU—suggested he’d throw “active grenades” at Mr. Damore onstage. Campus police took these threats seriously enough that they denied our request for a larger venue, despite overwhelming interest.

PDX Women in Tech, a local activist group, proclaimed itself “disheartened and appalled” that we were “engaging in discourse without an opposing viewpoint.” If they’d asked us, they’d have known we invited every tenured and tenure-track professor from the women’s studies department and were rebuffed. Meantime, the administration and student government have organized three counterevents to challenge “the notion that women do not generate ideas”—something Mr. Damore has never claimed. Opponents also attempted to deny our event an audience by hoarding the free tickets and not using them.

——————-

NLRB Damore v Google Advice Memorandum 1-16-2018 by Legal Insurrection on Scribd

 

 

 

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Comments

but of course he did…

some speech is more protected than others

    notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital in reply to redc1c4. | February 17, 2018 at 12:24 pm

    So Google is against all diversity of thought – unless they can dictate it like the Russian Stalin Dictator???????

      notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital in reply to notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital. | February 17, 2018 at 12:49 pm

      Google (Facebook too) caught as the biggest creators of FAKE NEWS?????

      “Sharyl Atkisson: The #FakeNews Moral Panic Was Foisted Upon Us by Google Plutocrat and Hillary Zealot Eric Schmidt

      http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=373887

        notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital in reply to notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital. | February 17, 2018 at 12:50 pm

        How Real Is Fake News? | Sharyl Attkisson | TEDxUniversityofNevada

        “MEDIA LITERACY” program in schools IS A FAKE AND MORE FAKE PROPAGANDA from the leftist Democrats!

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQcCIzjz9_s

          notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital in reply to notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital. | February 17, 2018 at 1:37 pm

          Sharyl Atkisson: The #FakeNews Moral Panic Was Foisted Upon Us by Google Plutocrat and Hillary Zealot Eric Schmidt

          “What if the whole anti-fake news campaign was an effort on somebody’s part to keep us from seeing or believing certain websites and stories by controversializing them or labeling them as fake news?” Attkisson posited.

          Digging deeper, she discovered that Google was one of the big donors behind First Draft’s [the first organization pounding the #FakeNews drumbeat] “fake news” messaging. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was run by Eric Schmidt, who happened to be a huge Hillary Clinton supporter.

          Schmidt “offered himself up as a campaign adviser and became a top multi-million donor to it. His company funded First Draft around the start of the election cycle,” Attkisson said. “Not surprisingly, Hillary was soon to jump aboard the anti-fake news train and her surrogate David Brock of Media Matters privately told donors he was the one who convinced Facebook to join the effort.”

          Attkisson declared that “the whole thing smacked of the roll-out of a propaganda campaign.”

          IBIB.

So to be clear – they’re COMPLETELY IGNORING whether Google was a ludicrously biased place to work, because Damore was EVIL MAN.

Too big to fail

regulus arcturus | February 16, 2018 at 7:33 pm

Not worried about this one.

NRLB has a history of defense of employers.

Sophir said the memo’s statements were “discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding effort to cloak comments with ‘scientific’ references and analysis, and notwithstanding ‘not all women’ disclaimers.”

Expressing one’s opinion on a topic is now sexual harassment? WTF?
If I say all men are assholes does that constitute sexual harassment by their definition?

casualobserver | February 16, 2018 at 8:17 pm

I’m shocked beyond words that the NLRB supports their decision with an entirely political rationale……

What about the EEOC?

I hope he has the money, or the backing, to take it up on appeal.

NLRB Associate General Counsel Jayme Sophir’s advice memo strays well beyond existing law.

Not just shut up, lie so they think you are one of them. No point in drawing attention to yourself.

Does anyone have an alternate source for the advice memo?
For some reason on my computer, the footnotes make reading the document difficult.

Paul In Sweden | February 17, 2018 at 1:22 am

I understand that all legal peaceful avenues have not been closed. It somewhat troubles me that the leftists aspire to remove all legal peaceful options. We saw this manifesting during the tail end of the Obama administration regarding land use out west. This is not good. Not unexpected. Bright lights must come forward with solutions.

“Sophir said the memo’s statements were “discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding effort to cloak comments with ‘scientific’ references and analysis, and notwithstanding ‘not all women’ disclaimers.”

This opinion reads like something taken from Google’s submission. Or, maybe Sopir read it earlier in a newspaper article.

    Marco100 in reply to davod. | February 17, 2018 at 3:21 pm

    Basically the opinion says Damore was fired for acting like a troll and to that extent, it’s correct, regardless of whether or not you think Damore was right or wrong. It’s like going to a Black Lives Matter convention, waving a Confederate Flag, and claiming protection of the First Amendment. You might be technically correct but you’re going to get kicked out of the convention.

The NLRB could just have ruled Damore’s memo not protected but the disturbing substance of the ruling is that a well-reasoned argument is deemed to be sexual harassment, implying the Google had an obligation to take action against Damore.

JusticeDelivered | February 17, 2018 at 8:29 am

Maybe someone needs to setup a funding site, it should be done directly with a bank, or perhaps a credit union, bypassing typical internet fundraising sites which have show biases. It would need to have credit-debit card processing, but should steer clear of PayPal.

it does not get any more Kafkaesque and Big Brother Thinkspeak than file a complaint for discrimination based on male sex and be told by leftist NLRB that you’re discriminating on sex gender…

Frankly, aside from whatever the specifics of his viewpoints might be, Damore is a naive idiot. His job at google was to keep his mouth shut and do programming or whatever he was getting paid to do. Writing manifestos to deliberately tick off your superiors is a guaranteed “fail.” Making a “test case” out of yourself, deliberately, is also idiotic. Has nothing to do with the value of his opinions. He is now free to say and write whatever he wants, but he shouldn’t expect google to keep him employed. He is playing a game he can’t win.

Apparently the message is that if/when your employer solicits your opinion or invites discussion on a topic, what’s expected is that you will know the correct response, and respond approvingly.

Just think of employer-sponsored discussion as a variety of asking, “Are you now or have you ever been the holder of any opinion that might contradict those approved by our HR and diversity apparat?” And then keep in mind that these approved opinions may and often do change overnight and without notice.

You didn’t really think they wanted to hear from you, did you? What they want is not mere compliance, but enthusiastic compliance: don’t ever be the last oneto stop clapping.

Americans used to laugh upon hearing that all Soviet organizations had at least one political officer, but we’re not laughing anymore. Are we, Mr Damore?