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On Thursday 8 November, the company announced that arbitration for individual complaints of sexual harassment or assault would become optional. This point was central to the demands of 20,000 Google employees across the world that took part in walkouts on 1 November, in response to a media report on the severance package paid to one of its executives who had been accused of sexual harassment (see article n°10881). Previously, forced arbitration was the company’s policy in such instances, which denies the complainant from being able to the matter to court and therefore attract more public attention to an incident. Several other measures were announced by Google in response to the protests, including an overhaul of its investigation framework, sharing of information on complaints and outcomes, support for victims, and annual training on sexual harassment, as opposed to once every two years at present. The change of company policy represents a partial response to the demands from the organisers of the walkouts, who said they would not give up on their action. Stephanie Parker, a Google employee and one of the organisers, says the situations “all have the same root cause, which is a concentration of power and a lack of accountability at the top”. She adds that the Google can solve these problems by “putting employee representation on the board and giving full rights and protections to contract workers, our most vulnerable workers, many of whom are black and Brown women”.
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