Don’t Be Evil

Google has some first rate employment practices to deal with racism and sexism, let me tell you what:

Benjamin Cruz, a former instructional designer in Google’s Cloud division, was caught off guard when a colleague told them that their skin was much darker than she expected.

Cruz, who is Mexican American and prefers to be identified by the pronouns they/them, reported the incident to human resources in 2019 where personnel told them they should “assume good intent,” Cruz recalled in an interview. Unsatisfied, Cruz asked human resources to look deeper into the incident, and an HR official said an investigation into the matter had been closed, Cruz said.

So, Cruz sought help from human resources again. The solution? Urge Cruz to take medical leave and tend to their mental health before moving to a new role in the company. Cruz went on medical leave, and hoped to take the company up on its offer for a new position, they said. But Cruz was turned down from every role they applied for, so they were forced to quit.

“After I made that complaint, my work started getting pushed out from under me, but my team acted like everything was fine. I wanted to find help,” Cruz said. “When the medical leave was recommended to me, it was like an automatic process.”

Must just be a mistake by a bad HR official, right……..

In the weeks since both women’s departures, nine other current and former Google employees have come forward to say they were treated the same way. They consulted human resources after colleagues made comments about their skin color or Black hairstyles, or asked if they were sexually interested in their teammates. They also contacted human resources to report retaliation after protesting sexual harassment issues and to advocate for raises for Black people to match white employees’ pay. Each time, human resource personnel recommended the employees seek therapy or take medical leave to address their mental health — despite their mental well-being having nothing to do with their complaints. An additional 12 current and former Google employees confirmed that this is a common practice at Google’s human resources department.

“Going on leave is so normalized. I can think of 10 people that I know of in the last year that have gone on mental health leave because of the way they were treated,” said a former Google employee, who is a person of color and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasnot authorized to speak about his work at Google. He went on medical leave last year after he said he had numerous unproductive conversations with human resources about how his colleagues discussed race.

Complaining about racism is a mental health issue. Oh, OK.

Truly our techbros are smarter and better than the rest of us and will lead us into the glorious tomorrow.