Google worker claims her bonuses were blocked for exposing pay inequality
A former Google employee claims she had her bonuses blocked by management after creating a crowd-sourced database revealing pay inequality. Erica Baker, who worked at Google in various software engineering roles, created the shared spreadsheet with the help of some former co-workers. Before Baker left the company in March 2015, she said “around 5%” of Google’s 50,000 employees had added their salary to the document. With so much data now in the open, employees feeling short-changed found it easier to ask for pay increases. Although Google could not act on what Baker had done, she found that $150 peer employee bonuses which Google staff can give each other for good work were not getting through to her. Colleagues, who had received pay increases as a result, were trying to give the tips to Baker for creating the spreadsheet, but these were being blocked. “Peer bonuses are rewarded at managers’ discretion. My manager was rejecting all of them…” she tweeted, claiming a male colleague who worked on the spreadsheet was still receiving his bonuses. (IBTimes)
Technology and Innovation
A plastic road could be piloted in the Netherlands within three years
Dutch construction company, Volker Wessels, is currently at concept design stage with ‘Plastic Road’, which could replace asphalt road surfaces. It said that the roads would be bedded on sand and form two-way highways with cycle paths on either side. It hopes to trial the scheme in Rotterdam by 2018. Plastic Road will be prefabricated in big slabs, so that new roads can be laid more quickly – and, due to better weather and abrasion resistance, they’ll last three times as long as asphalt, Volker Wessels says. The biggest questions – cost and safety – remain unanswered. Asphalt roads are relatively cheap because they can be laid with huge, mostly automated machines. Asphalt also offers strong grip in the wet and other inclement conditions, and road noise is generally very good. Plastic tends to be slippery when wet, and it could be costly to make Plastic Road entirely out of recycled materials. (NCE; arstechnica)
Policy
Australia’s war on wind farms threatens biggest renewable project
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s hostility to “visually awful” wind farms has sent a chill through the industry and could jeopardise the country’s biggest renewable energy project, a $2 billion-plus wind and solar plant in the country’s north. In an early sign that a new Federal policy could curtail major renewable projects, Windlab Ltd, which is planning to build the 1,200-megawatt Kennedy Energy Park in Queensland, said it may struggle to attract financing after the government blocked state support for wind farms. Conservative premier Abbott has been a vocal critic of wind farms, which he has also described as “ugly” and “noisy”, and has campaigned for coal-fired power. After cutting the country’s Renewable Energy Target by a fifth a month ago, Abbott took the green power industry by surprise by ordering the government’s A$10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to stop investing in wind farms, the country’s number two clean energy source behind hydropower. (Thomson Reuters)
Human Rights
Colombia’s National Development Plan threatens to allow mining firms to operate on illegally acquired lands
Several key provisions of a recently approved Colombian law and its National Development Plan (NDP) must be repealed since they threaten to legitimise the mass land grabs that have marked Colombia’s armed conflict, Amnesty International has said. The law contains several provisions that might enable mining and other economic interests to gain legal ownership over lands that could have been misappropriated through crimes during the course of the country’s internal armed conflict. During the course of the five decade conflict, some 8 million hectares of land has been illegally acquired from or abandoned under duress by mostly Indigenous, Afro-descendant and peasant farmer communities. Much of this land has been used for the development of agro-industrial, mining, oil or infrastructure projects. In many cases, civilian communities living in areas of economic interest were forcibly displaced to make way for the development of these projects, mostly by paramilitary groups and the security forces, and on occasions with the active support of companies and other economic interests, such as landowners and investors. (Amnesty International)
Partnerships
University caterers tuck in to new sustainability scheme
University food and drink in the UK is set to become more sustainable after the announcement of a new sector-backed sustainability partnership. The University Caterers Organisation (TUCO) has announced it will build on its partnership with the Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA) to launch a new programme to enable UK universities and colleges to feed sustainability into their catering services. The SRA will provide ratings to universities based on the source of their foods as well as monitoring the energy, waste and water efficiency of cafes and restaurants on campus. The rating system was developed with support from Plymouth University and the University of Brighton, with 18 further universities and colleges joining the SRA in the last year. The SRA rating system uses a three-star scale to rate universities considered to be ‘sustainability champions’. (Edie)
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