Communications of the ACM

“On the issue of diversity, I continue to hear from women and other workers in the tech industry who are harassed, bullied, assaulted, and ignored because they weren’t frat buddies with the CEO or turned down sexual overtures,” Speier says. “It’s a cultural crisis, and as I’ve made clear to the tech companies in and around my district, the industry will never reach its full potential until this crisis is addressed.” Google is hardly the only company being subjected to protests from its own employees; others also have protested how technology being developed by the companies they work for is being used by government entities. Representatives from Amazon, Sales-force, and Microsoft signed petitions and held demonstrations objecting to how their work is being used for surveillance, or to separate families at the U.S. border. According to Leigh Hafrey, a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and author of the book The Story of Success: Five Steps to Mastering Ethics in Business, these protest actions are occurring because workers are more aware of questions of social justice and what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate behavior.

“We’ve had a lot of social movement over the past several decades that raised awareness and made people conscious of what can potentially happen within organizations,” Hafrey says.

Indeed, thousands of workers at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Sales-force have signed petitions asking their respective management teams to cancel or withdraw from contracts with U.S. government agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Department of Defense. The public nature of these protests and petitions may be having an effect; in June 2019, Google employees succeeded in getting the company to agree not to renew its deal to help the Pentagon build artificial intelligence tools for drone warfare.

Other protests have been less than successful. Salesforce.com employees gathered twice in 2018 in front of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco to protest the firm’s multimil-lion-dollar contract with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.

While CEO Marc Benioff condemned the agency’s separation of families at the border, he refused to cancel the contract, and the company still supplies software to the agency, despite continuing pressure from workers.

Ultimately, workers may be able to make their voices heard, but management at many large companies are likely to be more focused on how their decisions impact the company’s bottom line, and so may not always bow to the wishes of employees.

Ceren Cubukcu, an employment consultant and author of Make Your American Dream A Reality: How to Find a Job as an International Student in the U.S., says employees may simply decide to work for another company if they have a problem with a technology company’s actions, rather than protesting to get their employer to change course.

“In some projects, especially for
IT/high tech projects, you don’t even
know what the whole project will be
at the end because you work in teams,
and only the top management knows
about the whole project,” Cubukcu
says. “If you don’t feel comfortable in
your job or don’t like your work, you
can always try to switch to another job,
and the company can always replace
you with some other employee.”
That said, the bargaining posi-
tion for many tech workers is perhaps
stronger than it ever has been in his-
tory, given that programmers, software
engineers, and data scientists that are
talented, hardworking, and reliable are
relatively hard to find and keep.

“Finding good technical people is
difficult,” Sahami says, “so companies
pay more attention to their workers be-
cause they realize that these are highly
skilled people who are difficult to find.
If those tech workers leave, it’s going to
have a serious impact on the productiv-
ity of the company.”
Even young people who have yet to
establish themselves in their careers
are trying to flex their muscles, shun-
ning companies they don’t agree with
during the interview and hiring pro-
cess. A Buzzfeed article published in Au-
gust 2018 included several accounts of
tech workers that declined lucrative po-
sitions at major technology companies
because they disagreed with the com-
pany’s practices or ethical positions, re-
lating to either the products or services
the company builds, the customers to
which the companies sell, or how the
companies treat their own employees.
“Questions have always been raised
about what companies do and why they
do it,” Hafrey says. “We’re just seeing
it in a way that I think maybe we were
not previously considering because
we were enamored of the bright future
that our recent technologies promised
us, and we are now realizing the down-
side or potential downsides of some of
those technologies.”
Sahami adds that there may be a
generational reason for the increasing
level of activism in the technology field.
“There’s lots of data that shows, for ex-
ample, that many in the younger gen-
eration look for work that they believe
that has value and that’s more impor-
tant to them than just the paycheck;
it’s believing that they’re having some
sort of social impact,” Sahami says.

“There’s been a lot of bad behavior, and not just in the tech industry, but more broadly around issues of sexual harassment that has been in some sense tolerated for a long time. And it shouldn’t have been tolerated, but over time, culture changes and people are willing to speak up more about that being unacceptable and so, generationally, we begin to call out more and more of these bad behaviors that’s been happening and try to rectify it.”