General > General Technical Chat
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Ed.Kloonk:
Holy Moly.
jpanhalt:
@paulca
I second the wow and cannot comment specifically on much of what you describe for lack of knowledge.
In the US, "at will" employees (a legal term) have some rights but the employer can do many things. FOIA requests apply to the government. I do not believe they apply to companies. Companies can request and demand many things so long as they do not adversely affect a protected class disproportionately to the majority.
For example, a company can forbid its employees to use tobacco products (i.e., chew or smoke) even in their private homes and can enforce that by testing for nicotine metabolites in blood. Testing of illegal/illicit drugs have been going on for a long time, but expansion to dictating otherwise legal lfestyle choices is more recent. I am not sure whether the question of placing arbitrary restrictions has been tested.*(see edit) But smoking, vaccination, health physicals, etc. are justified on the basis of costs for healthcare that may pass through to the company or other legitimate business factors, regardless of how lame that excuse is. Some companies will not allow employees to pilot a private aircraft.
Of course, that applies to at will employees. Unionized employees are covered by contract, but individual employees may have little input into them. In Minnesota, a recent teachers union contract allows seniority to be bystepped if a reduction in force (which usually strictly follows seniority) would result in the firing of a less senior minority person over a more senior non-minority person. That is, the more senior person who is non-minority gets fired. I am sure the non-minority employees do not like that.
For contracted employees, both sides are bound by contract, but in most cases, the employer has the upper hand.
In your case, it probably boils down to the contract your employer has with the American company and whether you are an at will or contracted employee. I doubt it will give you a copy of that contract without a battle. Your grievance probably begins with your employer. If you are one of the protected groups in the US and can show/claim that you have been illegally discriminated against, you might point that out, but I doubt you will get very far. More likely, you will end up reassigned and/or recalled home. You will probably not be part of those discussions.
*Edit: There are rules against actions that violate the "public conscience." That is, an at will employee cannot be fired if the reason goes against public conscience, such as whistle blowing. Any smart employer will never give a cause for discharging an at will employee. Also, employment law in the US is usually at the State level.
pcprogrammer:
--- Quote from: Ed.Kloonk on August 20, 2022, 10:05:04 am ---Holy Moly.
--- End quote ---
Yes indeed :palm:
Edit: On the plus side and to follow Monty Python advise to look on the bright side of life, in another 10 years time experienced and good engineers will have become a minority :-DD
paulca:
--- Quote from: jpanhalt on August 20, 2022, 10:49:49 am ---@paulca
I second the wow and cannot comment specifically on much of what you describe for lack of knowledge.
--- End quote ---
I'm curious if the "wow" is because of the rat's nest of being internationally "seconded"/contracted or because I went there?
It is a rat's nest. Especially given the sector I work in is a high security information domain. I am legally bound internationally on many things, including criminal negligence type offenses. Thankfully I'm nowhere near the front line on those things. It's meaningless integers, reals, timestamps and strings to me. I'm thankful for that. I will talk about my work from a software/systems engineering aspect, but never using empirical business information or specifics. "Never take it home.", in the first place, policy. I'll talk about a company, but never mention which. I'll redact and fabricate specifics to give examples. I've yet to get in trouble for disclosure or other security related infractions, although I have whistle blown on a few practices and thankfully that was received as the correct professional checks and balances that needed to be addressed. (Account/password sharing. Cross/out of channel communications requesting internal company information or contact information).
I hadn't even thought of the "criminal" aspects. I mean whose law applies? If I am sitting in Belfast (UK with a big toe stuck in the EU's door), accessing a computer system in London, using it to access systems in the US, working with people from Singapore for a US company. I'd start by assuming "all of the above", and that's never really been a problem.
It's not really a problem now (limiting scope), but it's like I can hear the shells landing in the distance and a shift between the US and UK legal policies on factors such as discrimination and PII disclosure and protection, could move that front line closer and, not going to the worst case scenario, I could be criminally or civilly charged in the states for a legally allowed action in the UK or vice versa. I don't know much about US law, but I do know a hell of a lot more about US law than I do Singapore law!
Personal issues with this asides, there are genuine professional information security issues presenting which ARE part of my professional scope of discussion in work. I am legally/professionally required to understand and adhere to things like GDPR et. al. and encourage enforcement of those policies in software.
I did look at what the "current" safe guards are on employee information transferred from the UK to the US and no surprises Brexit has more or less trashed it and paraphase: "there currently are short comings in the data transfer legislation which leaves UK employees unsatisfactorily protected". It basically says, "you be boned.", it's mostly up to the companies and their agreements, other more stringent frameworks exist, but they are not mandatory.
The GDPR (and other) 'rights' have a clause on consent. Consent is everything. You have to provide people with a real choice to provide or not provide the information. I don't get that, some times for regulatory reasons, but very often because it's a customer company asking for my details and they don't accept "N/A" and "Undisclosed" as answers in their part of the world. That has professional implications of refusal. Always saying "No" to requests for PII from customers would tend to make you inflexible and less valuable to your company.
In Northern Ireland we have been through this. It still goes on today. Every year, every employee must submit an FEC (Fair employment commission) disclosure stating their age, sex, religion and community alignment. These surveys, almost like voting, are meant to be handled in the upmost of privacy and the form does NOT include their name or any identifier which can be associated with an actual person. This is extremely heavily regulated "diversity" monitoring to highlight, not fix, but highlight "community biases"... the regulation around never attaching that information to PII is important. However it is of course frequently poorly executed. This year, a single person in HR emailed the entire Belfast office with a word document and asked to complete it. It wasn't even a well done Word form, it wasn't editable and you couldn't tick the tick boxes or edit the form text boxes. I did complete it and return it, but it felt wrong. In the days when it was a paper form, on site, it went back into a pile instantly, no identifier on it. But asking for it over email, or asking for it via anything BUT a completely anonymous route is a violation of the principle of it being none PII. Your name is on the email, your name is in the edit history on the document. Luckily it was to a single person email address, but you never can tell the actual distribution for monitoring.
The important, related part about this form is how it's processed. There is the "None of the above" type options. However the data officer is permitted to know the post code or primary school of the subject and is permitted to put an "assumed community" on the record. If THIS practice is applied to surveys on topics such as gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. etc. Many companies may have HR records inappropriately labelling me in a discriminatory way without consent to do so.
To keep your job, you maybe should just shut up and keep smiling, keep taking the salary.
madires:
Salery? Shouldn't it be called compensation for personal suffering? >:D
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