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GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

latimes.com

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Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#91

Post by hnruss »

creaghpatr wrote: post #24
geofft wrote: post #14

> With the issue refusing to go away, GitHub executives have changed their internal messaging, including a memo to employees saying barring ICE from “access to GitHub could actually hurt the very people we all want to help,” in the words of Chief Operating Officer Erica Brescia. > “We have learned from a number of nonprofits and refugee advocates that one of the greatest challenges facing immigrants is a lack of tech…

ICE is not a partisan organization, it's a government agency. If you pay taxes, you support ICE, and are their customer, period.

If you pay taxes, you "support" the entire government. That doesn't mean that you are in favor of all of the things that it is doing.

If you pay taxes, you are a citizen, not a "customer". These things are not the same.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#92

Post by catalogia »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #23
nrook wrote: post #9

There is a well-known strategy by which employees can exert influence over their employer and change the decisions it makes. It is called a union. Unionization has been slow for various reasons in the tech sector; when it comes to rich, well-known companies, people don't want to go through the effort to unionize and get more money when they already are being paid a lot. But if workers want to influence decisions like…

Unions have historically tended to reward seniority over merit. Tech workers should work to solve that if they organize. I think a lot of problems caused by unions trace back to that. Unions should come back to help recreate the middle class.

I think, at least traditionally, unions have tended to reward seniority over merit because seniority is something that can be tracked with relative objectivity, while merit is something a bit slippery to nail down.

Of course the business owner has strong opinions on what constitutes employee merit. To the business owner, the merit of an employee is largely a proxy for whatever is profitable for the business. That's fine for the business, but if the union uses that same metric as merit, they'd become little more than a proxy for the intention of the business owners. For a union to be merit-based rather than seniority-based, they'd need to find a measure of merit that was in the interest of the workers, not the business.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#93

Post by blt »

blt wrote: post #43
mc32 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the opposite of politics. They’re leaving politics out of it and saying, if it’s legit business we won’t deny you business.

Right, and IBM was also leaving out politics when they built custom tabulating machines to help Nazi Germany's logistics. Obvious hyperbole but you get the idea.

> Yes. If IBM built something that helped the government during the Obama administration, would you consider it "political" too?

Helping the government in general != helping one specific government agency with a narrow mission. Maybe you could provide an example of a government program/agency whose mission you consider somehow "opposite" to ICE.

But sure. Helping any entity accomplish a politically controversial activity is a political act.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#94

Post by maximente »

geofft wrote: post #14

> With the issue refusing to go away, GitHub executives have changed their internal messaging, including a memo to employees saying barring ICE from “access to GitHub could actually hurt the very people we all want to help,” in the words of Chief Operating Officer Erica Brescia. > “We have learned from a number of nonprofits and refugee advocates that one of the greatest challenges facing immigrants is a lack of tech…

i disagree. this is cleverly appealing to the /potential/ of the technology to help people, a classic moral play to technologists.

re-read this carefully:

> We have learned from a number of nonprofits and refugee advocates that one of the greatest challenges facing immigrants is a lack of technology at ICE and related agencies, resulting in lost case files, court date notifications not being delivered, or the wrong people being charged or deported,” read a companywide posting sent Oct. 22, signed by Brescia and the leadership team.

carefully note that there are no examples given of the technology actually helping people, just the possibility dangled out there that somehow by offering GitHub services (??) various other mishaps may get improved.

the underlying theme is, "technology could help people, so it's OK that we're continuing to work with ICE."

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#95

Post by shadowgovt »

baggy_trough wrote: post #50
shadowgovt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are concentration camps on the southern US border.

That kind of characterization is hysterical nonsense.

That kind of characterization is definitional. See: the Japanese Internment camps the US ran during World War II.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#96

Post by blt »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #67
blt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, recognize that the company is worthless without its laborers, and that the laborers can use collective bargaining to change the company mission.

Ah yes, nothing says collective bargaining by labor like "Worker leaves company where most value is generated by automation."

Workers leave. That's the "collective" part.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#97

Post by andyburke »

zozbot234 wrote: post #46
joshypants wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not simply partisan-ness. It's specifically pro-authoritarian, anti-immigrant. It's saying it's okay to inflict child abuse on non-citizens as a deterrent against lawbreaking. And a whole bunch of other things.

If separating children from their parents (who have committed a crime) is "child abuse", then our government is responsible for a whole lot of abuse. It's not clear what this has to do with ICE specifically.

Children are generally not separated from their parents when their parents commit non-violent minor offenses. Crossing a border is, at the least, non-violent. How major or minor it is is debatable.

The basis of your argument is wrong. What else ya got?

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#98

Post by geofft »

creaghpatr wrote: post #74
ilikehurdles wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it’s the by-the-book definition of partisan, it is still reasonable for people to have strong moral or ethical objections to working for this client.

But not to receiving their services, apparently.

According to the Washington Times (a right-wing news organization), 49% of Americans live in sanctuary jurisdictions, based on data from FAIR (a right-wing pro-ICE advocacy group). https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/10/half-of-ame...

I think that makes it clear that a sizable number of Americans are opposed to receiving ICE's services, only receive them because there isn't actually a way to opt out of them, and are doing the next closest thing.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#99

Post by mc32 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #90
mc32 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s a neutral position not taking a stance for or against a particular business because of politics. So while it may look to someone like it’s “for” something, they’d also take business from an “ICE-alert” system, so from some PoV that would look like it’s “against”, but it’s not. It’s staying neutral.

There's the edge of a definitions rabbit-hole looming. To short-circuit it, let's establish as ground-truth that some people think "neutral" is the same has having no position, and some people think "neutral" is a position one can try to take that will have consequences, same as any other position, and at the end of the day, the effects are the same whether it's not a position or a position so the question of "positi…

So ultimately we’re societies built on laws. Sometimes we have embargoes. We don’t allow sales to Iran or Cuba, but we allow sales to China and Russia and a bunch of others. Most companies stay neutral and don’t take a stance. Walmart and Amazon don’t check you or me for our good citizen creds before selling goods to us. We could be ex felons for all they care. Unless the gov says don’t sell something to X, then we can. It’s a bit of circular reasoning but that’s all we have. We build human institutions to support our human activities.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#100

Post by joyeuse6701 »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #80
creaghpatr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not to receiving their services, apparently.

I can’t pick and choose where my taxes go any more than I can pick and choose which constitutional amendments I want to see enforced. I can’t stop a war but I can choose not to work for military contractors.

Yes you can. You may give up your citizenship in exchange for another.
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