Anyone remember a company called Google that used to have the phrase “Don’t be evil” as its slogan? Google was the company that included the following statement in Amendment No.9 to its Form S-1 Registration Statement to the SEC on 18 August 2004: “Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways – by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.”
It also made a point of stressing that users “trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.”
I only ask because there’s another Google now. This Google is quite a bit different. For instance, this Google, not content with tracking so much of your activity online, is now giving advertisers the ability to follow your credit and debit card purchases offline.
And yet, strangely, this Google, which had revenues of around nearly $25 billion in the first quarter of 2017, the Google which has such sophisticated systems and processing capabilities that it can track so much of what a person does online (and offline) can’t expend the time or resources to analyse its own data.
Not only that, this Google can’t use its systems so people who work for the company can make important decisions about their financial status. It can’t provide search results that are unbiased and objective and they certainly aren’t “the best we know how to produce”. This Google, which prides itself on just how much data it can provide to advertisers about people who use its products, can’t provide wage data about its own employees.
This Google is the company complaining it can’t afford to spend 500 hours of work and $100,000 to comply with demands from the Department of Labour (DoL) for wage data about its own employees. One of its attorneys has even described the process as “a very time-consuming and burdensome project”.
And what is causing such difficulties for Google? A demand from the DoL to provide historical salary data so it can ascertain whether the “unbiased and objective” company has been underpaying women employees. According to a report in the Guardian, Google claims to have already spent nearly $500,000 and 2,300 hours of work to partially comply with the DoL’s demands.
The Guardian quotes Google’s senior legal operations manager, Kristin Zmrhal, complaining that trying to comply had become “too burdensome” and it had been forced to hire a third party vendor to help because “the team was bogged down”.
The company, which claims it has plugged the gender pay gap and provides equal pay across races in the US, has already tried to have the case dismissed.
This does raise a number of questions. The biggest of which must be: How can it be so difficult, complex and complicated for a company like Google, which has built a business on collecting, analysing and applying data to produce the relevant data on the salaries of its own employees? What could be making it so difficult and expensive?
This Google, which has annual revenues of more than $80 billion but complains that it may have to spend $100,000 to provide important data on how its pays and rewards female employees, seems a long way removed from the Google that described itself 13 years ago as “a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gain”.
This Google no longer has “Don’t be evil” as its motto but I can’t help wondering, given the contrast between its behaviour in the current court case and the ideals espoused by the company’s founders back in 2004, if it might want to consider another motto: “Don’t be Google.”
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