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When thousands of Google employees walked out in protest against the company’s lenient treatment of senior men accused of sexual misconduct, their action was publicly reinforced by staff on social media. The organisers of Thursday’s demonstration, using the hashtag #Googlewalkout, stated that “we need transparency, accountability and structural change”.
The worldwide Google protest is the most recent example of dissent at technology companies. Different from whistleblowers and external campaign groups of past decades, this form of protest comes from an organisation’s own employees. They are emboldened by the knowledge that their skills are in short supply, they are used to debating online freely — and are even encouraged to do so on internal employee networks.
Speaking at a conference in New York, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, expressed support for the walkout: “There is anger and frustration within the company . . . we set a very high bar and clearly didn’t live up to it.”
The Google staff walkout came two weeks after a forceful article about another tech group spread rapidly on the internet. Entitled “I’m an Amazon employee. My company shouldn’t sell facial recognition tech to police”, the anonymous writer argued Amazon’s Rekognition software “should not be used as a tool for mass surveillance”.
The writer joined a groundswell of tech workers taking public issue with their employers’ policies in recent months. Their article, written for Medium, the opinion publisher, added: “We follow in the steps of the Googlers who spoke out against the Maven contract [which provides image recognition technology to the Pentagon] and Microsoft employees who are speaking out against the JEDI [a bid for the US Department of Defense’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud project] contract.”
Y-Vonne Hutchinson, founder of ReadySet, a diversity consultancy based in California, says this movement is likely to grow. “It is harder for tech companies not to take ethical stances. They are playing more and more of a significant role in people’s daily lives,” she says.
On the Google walkout and Mr Pichai’s response, she says: “Actions speak louder than words. We’ll know how far his support extends when we see whether or not Google makes the systemic changes that the organisers have suggested.”
Workers recognise they are in a position of strength because of the race for talent in tech companies: “Employees can singularly or collectively use the most valuable resource they have — themselves — and walk out the door. They can also rally their networks to make it harder for organisations to hire.”
Employees have been slow to understand the power of such dissent, says a spokesperson for the Tech Workers Coalition, a campaign group uniting tech white-collar and service workers. But they claim momentum is growing: “We are organising to build worker power through rank and file self-organisation and education.”
Bretton Putter, author of Culture Decks Decoded, published this month, says public dissent is a natural consequence of tech companies espousing their values and principles on the internet. The most memorable example was Google’s motto “Don’t be evil”. Following a restructuring in 2015 under the Alphabet group, the parent company adopted a different line: “Do the right thing”, although Google retained the original.
After Netflix shared its employee slide deck online in 2009, including its policy of unlimited time off and intolerance of anything below high performance, other companies followed suit, including Asana’s Culture Code.
Mr Putter says tech companies have turned their culture into an “asset”, particularly useful in recruitment. “For the company and the employees, it is an implicit contract. They sign up for ‘this is how we work, this is what we stand for’. If the company breaks the trust and doesn’t match the values, then it becomes personal.”
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