noting that the company had taken
“an increasingly hard line” on inappropriate conduct at work and had
fired 48 people, including 13 senior
managers, in the previous two years,
without giving any of them exit packages. Just prior to a November 1 protest by employees known as “The
Walkout for Real Change,” Pichai
sent out a follow-up note apologizing “for the past actions and the pain
they have caused employees” and indicating that employees would be supported if they protested.
Despite the apology, thousands of
Google employees around the world
walked out on November 1, and organizers issued a statement demanding more transparency from Google
around its handling of sexual harassment, an end to pay and opportunity
inequality, and more employee empowerment overall. In addition, the
group requested that an employee
representative be appointed to the
company’s board and that Google end
“forced arbitration” in cases of harassment and discrimination, a practice
that prevents employees from taking
cases to court.
“Silicon Valley companies lead the
way in the fields of science of and technology, but when it comes to issues of
privacy, creating inclusive workplaces,
and ethics, they seem to be devolving,”
says Congresswoman Jackie Speier,
who represents San Francisco and
parts of Silicon Valley, and publicly
supported the walkouts.
Lack of diversity is a problem in the
tech industry. For example, nearly 70%
of Google employees are men and 53%
are non-Hispanic whites, according
to the Google Diversity Annual Report
2018. Among leadership roles, the
numbers within Google are even less
diverse, as 67% are white non-Hispanic
and 75% are men.
ORGANIZED PROTESTS AGAINST companies are hardly a new phenomenon, as peo- ple have boycotted or pro- tested both corporate policies and actions for years. For example,
a global protest of international agro-chemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto in 2013 saw
coordinated marches across 52 countries and 436 cities. In 2010, thousands
of people in the U.S. protested against
oil giant BP for its role in the Deepwater
Horizon oil spill. And in the late 1990s,
U.S. gun owners protested against gun
manufacturers Colt Manufacturing
Company and Smith & Wesson for their
perceived cooperation with then-Presi-dent Bill Clinton’s gun control efforts.
Yet many of the corporate protests
that have occurred against technology companies over the past year were
marked by a distinct difference: they
were often organized by, led, or coordinated with workers at the very companies being protested. The impetus for
these walkouts appears to be largely
two issues: the presence of a culture of
inequality at technology companies,
and the use of technology for what
workers consider to be unethical or
harmful activities.
Although there is precedent for tech
workers protesting against their employers, such as when defense workers
in the 1980s pushed back against their
employers’ participation in the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative,
colloquially known as Star Wars, the difference is that tech workers feel more
empowered to speak out today.
“[Workers] actually see that their
words and action can have a real impact
on a broader scale,” says Mehran Sa-
hami, a professor of computer science
at Stanford University. Sahami points to
the success former Uber employee Su-
san Fowler had with blog posts she wrote
that detailed a culture of sexual harass-
ment at the ride-sharing giant, which
ultimately led to changes at the company
and the dismissal of its former CEO, Tra-
vis Kalanick. “Fowler’s actions showed
that even individual tech workers, by
speaking up, can actually have a large ef-
fect on the organization that they’re in or
were formerly in,” Sahami says.
It is not just a culture of misogyny
that is irritating workers and spurring
them into action; a lack of transparency
is also a key catalyst for workers to band
together to make their feelings known.
One example was Google’s handling
of a $90-million exit payment to Andy
Rubin, a key executive of the company
and the creator of the Android mobile
operating system. Upon Rubin’s depar-
ture from the company in 2014, Google
failed to disclose it had received a com-
plaint that Rubin had committed an act
of sexual misconduct against another
employee, and that an investigation
had confirmed its veracity. In October
2018, a report in The New York Times
made these details public.
Upon that disclosure, Google CEO
Sundar Pichai sent a memo to staff
Ethics in
Technology Jobs
Employees are increasingly challenging
technology companies on their ethical choices.
Society | DOI: 10.1145/3323702 Keith Kirkpatrick
“Silicon Valley
companies lead the
way in ... science and
technology, but when
it comes to issues
of privacy, creating
inclusive workplaces,
and ethics, they seem
to be devolving.”