Communications of the ACM

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.