I am shocked, SHOCKED to discover the company that has repeatedly proven to be repeatedly to conduct themselves in a manner nothing less than careless and evil is also equally careless and evil in their internal conduct. I mean, we’re talking about the company whose guiding principle is “Break the law to make money, ask forgiveness later when you’re too big for them to refuse to give it”, who could have ever guessed that something like this might happen?
Also, they’re getting HR to investigate the misdeeds of the HR department? What a bullshit PR move. I expect one of two possible outcomes - if they’re stupid, they play a spirited game of “Throw cards in a hat” for a week, then declare there’s absolutely no problem.
If they’re the kind of smart that Uber likes, they’ll play a spirited game of “Throw cards in a hat” for a week, fire a bunch of people using this an an opportunity to get rid of people they don’t like, and come out with a statement that says “We’ve fired all the offending parties, everything is great now!”
Not that it would help either way, really - when you’re dropping from 25%+ plus women in your workforce to 3%, in a single year, then that speaks of a much deeper problem than one little HR investigation into one case is going to handle, and they know it. Uber isn’t pissed that his happened, they’re pissed that they got caught, again.
This article seems to state that the law you link to only makes it illegal if you’re involved in a legal action or expect to be involved in one.
I am not a lawyer. I haven’t seen a company without a set email retention policy in tech in the last decade and the ones I’ve seen, as I recall, were usually at 90 days.
No I’m not a lawyer, but I did work for a legal services firm that specialized in electronic discovery. Our bread and butter was indexing emails from huge corporations. I’m sure they’ll get the message when they’re held in contempt of court, or are found automatically guilty.
Thanks for sharing. Again, go ahead and email all the tech companies because, as far as I know, they all have policies in place for email and they aren’t “archive forever.”
As well you shouldn’t [trust HR]. They’re there to protect the company, and any overlap between the interests of the company and the interests of workers is purely coincidental. That’s not to say that a great many companies don’t care about their workers, or that many HR reps don’t get into the field to do good work. But when push comes to shove, few companies will authorize HR to follow a trail of corruption to its end, and cut it out. Uber is certainly not one of those few.
I love my job. But I’ve watched a lot of women get drummed out (almost including myself), even after doing all the ‘right’ things to resolve nasty situations at work.
“I’ve instructed HR to investigate itself, so I’m sure they’ll get the bottom of why they didn’t manage to convince this woman it was all her fault.”
Despite a clearly very hostile work environment, no one has yet sued Uber, so I’d say HR was doing their job quite well. It may not bet the job we think they should be doing, but it’s the job they’ve been tasked with by the company they work for, so…
That’s right!! If you were the best engineers, the greatest engineers, you would be successful!! Bigly so successful!!
Easy. Learn doublespeak, look like you care, kiss the right behinds. You are HR now!!
That would be sweet. “Do you have this email from 180 days ago? No your honor, it was deleted per company policy. Really? Award of damages for plaintiff against the company plus jail time for the executives for destruction of evidence.”
Unfortunately it’s not incompetence. It only appears that way when people imagine HR works for them, or expect to encounter a process that is fair, measured, or in any way resembles what in law would be considered “due process.” They exist to make employee problems go away, and to do it in a way that minimizes impact to the company’s interests. They have wide latitude in how they approach that mandate, including punishing victims and acting as willing participants in internal political games. They aren’t all evil people. Most are quite pleasant and sincere until “the incident,” and then all too often you’ll discover they’re part of what Zimbardo might call an evil-engendering environment.
It makes sense when you frame the modern corporate HR organization as an example of the dysfunctional “self-regulation” companies trot out to pretend to the naive and libertarian-minded that truly labor-interested structures like unions and regulations are unnecessary. People think HR has their back because that’s the fiction they’ve been presented, and it’s taken root so thoroughly that when it all goes wrong people think they’ve just encountered a single bad HR person, not that it’s all a cruel joke and nobody has your back at all.
You don’t go to HR to solve your problem. You go to HR because it’s a due diligence hoop you must jump through on the way to your lawyer’s office, and if you are concerned about the career impact of suing (or threatening to sue) an employer, then rest assured that dilemma exists on purpose.
This is pretty much the short of it. As an employee anywhere if you want to cover your own ass against co-workers or management you must know what’s expected of you, what your role is, etc. and clearly document all interactions in a public way. Someone ask you to do something? Email it to me. Someone got a problem? Email. Even if you get let go but there’s no grounds for a suit you can at least defend yourself if they give you a bad reference or something that impacts future hires.
Being on the 18th floor buys them about three and a half seconds of extra air time. That doesn’t even take into account the bounces, rolls, and/or splatters. Pretty good deal.
I doubt they can really fire people like they say. They let this run wild for so long that now they have key personnel in the infrastructure that would be very hard to replace. That’s why these thing should be dealt with at first warnings.
What we worker bees often forget is that HR isn’t there to help employees, it’s there for the company. If that means denial and coverup, then that’s what they do. More often, they establish a “grievance procedure” to forestall lawsuits.
Data retention varies by jurisdiction and industry, and topic. 90 days is pretty short, places I have seen are more like 1 year.
Regardless of any standard data retention policy, there are a number of exceptions that must be retained for long or indefinite periods – specifically emails related to securities trading, taxes, emails related to current or future legal action, including all emails of people named in a lawsuit, or on the topic of said lawsuit. Its a bit fuzzy, but I am pretty sure that any email addressed to HR describing potentially illegal behavior cannot legally be deleted. Generally the data retention policy is implemented on the corporate servers, deleting the copy from your local email client should not affect the copy retained by policy. That is, if you have a 6 month email data retention policy, but allowed someone to delete an email detailing potentially illegal conduct in a shorter period of time, that would be very bad, as it would be seen as a deliberate cover-up, whereas if it were merely deleted per policy, you could have plausible deniability that you weren’t trying to destroy evidence.
Even at tech companies less shitty than Uber sounds, turnover is super high. I bet that most of the people directly involved, whether the harassers, the victims, or the HR and managers who enabled it have already left for a variety of reasons. Probably any managers that didn’t quit out of disgust or just got better/different jobs have been encouraged to leave – upper management clearly had to know what was going on in broad strokes even if HR successfully kept the fine points away from them, and a nice house cleaning before the inevitable shitstorm they had to know was coming makes it a lot easier to say “we investigated, identified 100 people at fault, and by golly we fired the two who hadn’t already left. Please don’t look too closely at upper management, we didn’t know all this was going on under our direction.”
