San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Tech far from unified on tax to aid homeless
The day she moved to San Francisco in her early 20s, Dana Sniezko said it felt like home. That was more than a decade ago. As tent cities bloomed across the city and she saw people close to her struggle with homelessness, Sniezko, now a software engineer at Stripe, decided she needed to do more to make her adopted home feel whole. She began knocking on doors for the campaign to pass Proposition C, a ballot measure to reduce homelessness with a new business tax, and personally donated $4,100 to the Yes on C campaign.
Her employer, an online-payments startup valued by investors at $20 billion, is spending a hundred times Sniezko’s amount to defeat the measure, donating $419,999, according to campaign filings.
Stripe, in turn, has been outspent by a crosstown foe: Salesforce chief Marc Benioff, who has committed $7.9 million in personal and corporate money to get Prop. C passed.
Prop. C, one of the city’s most closely watched
measures in Tuesday’s election, has spurred a monetary arms race between tech moguls. Benioff is the most notable “yes” voice; Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, oppose the measure. The three of them are worth an estimated $15 billion and employ a large segment of the city’s fast-growing tech workforce. But all their wealth and power hasn’t won them lockstep loyalty from their employees.
“I support Prop. C,” Sniezko said in an email, “because homelessness in S.F. is a humanitarian crisis and we have a moral obligation to address that head on.”
Blind, an app that lets workers talk about their companies anonymously, conducted a poll of its users for The Chronicle in late October, asking employees of Salesforce, as well as Stripe and other companies opposing Prop. C, how they feel about the tax. Blind verifies users’ work emails to determine their employer.
While not scientific — participants volunteer their answers, they are not randomly sampled — the results give a glimpse into how divided San Francisco tech workers may be. Nearly 330 people participated, with 60 percent saying they oppose Prop. C. An overwhelming majority of Stripe and Square employees said they would vote no on Prop. C, echoing the sentiments of their CEOs. Dorsey has pitched in $125,000 to the opposition campaign, and Square has contributed an additional $50,000.
Even across Dorsey’s companies, opinions differ. At Twitter, which has not taken a position, 15 respondents said they support Prop. C, and 16 oppose it. Twitter declined to comment.
Despite Benioff ’s voluble support for Prop. C — a campaign office inside Salesforce Tower houses a phone bank for volunteers with the Yes on C campaign — only a narrow majority of Salesforce workers surveyed on the Blind app said they would vote for Prop. C.
At least 65 tech professionals have each donated more than $100 to the Yes on C campaign, according to public records. (The city doesn’t require donors who give less than $100 to provide employer information.) Those supporters range from an Airbnb experience designer who gave $100, to a Pinterest search quality engineer who contributed $500, to Evan Owski, a startup founder who now works at LinkedIn and has spent more than $39,000 to pass Prop. C.
Sniezko is one of two Stripe employees who donated at least $100 to the Yes on C campaign, according to public records, though she said she suspects that more of her colleagues donated smaller amounts.
She said she believes the measure would “make the city a better place to live and work” through increasing the number of shelter beds, providing mental health care services, and creating public restrooms.
Sniezko said she could not comment on Stripe’s position specifically, but has heard “few substantive policy arguments” and “a lot of excuses” from the measure’s opponents, which include Stripe.
Collison, Sniezko’s boss, has argued that Prop. C doesn’t have the teeth to ensure new funds would be properly spent. But some people have called into question the tech billionaire’s motives. Observers believe Stripe and other financial services companies would pay more in taxes under Prop. C than a business like Salesforce, because San Francisco taxes companies of different industries at different rates.
Sniezko shrugged off the claim.
“Large companies received a windfall from permanent corporate tax cuts enacted by a Republican-controlled Congress,” she said, “and most will still come out ahead with a modest increase in gross receipts tax from Prop. C.”
Benioff says Salesforce has saved much more from cuts in the federal corporate income tax than the $10 million additional tax he estimates the company would owe. Stripe is privately held, so its financial performance is not known, but if it is unprofitable like many startups, it would not see any immediate benefit from the federal tax cuts. Travis Brown, who until a few weeks ago worked as a software engineer at Stripe, donated $100 in support of Prop. C. Brown tweeted that he left the company “in part because of decisions like this,” including a screenshot of a campaign finance statement showing Stripe’s sixfigure contribution to the No on C campaign. Brown did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. Stripe declined to comment for privacy reasons.
Employment law experts say rank-and-file tech workers have good reason to avoid sharing their political differences with company executives in public, because their comments could be seen as disparaging their companies. Yet many tech companies deliberately foster a culture of internal
debate, and cracking down on workers for expressing their views could hurt their prospects of recruiting sought-after candidates.
John Hyland, a partner at employment law firm Rukin Hyland & Riggin, said a much greater number of people are willing to criticize their employer in today’s political climate. Sometimes, as when thousands of Google employees staged walkouts around the world Thursday to protest the company’s handling of sexual misconduct claims, they do so with the bosses’ express sanction.
Most employees in the U.S. work “at will,” which means they can be fired at any time, for any reason, unless that reason is illegal, said Ceilidh Gao, an attorney with the National Employment Law Project.
Hyland said if a Square employee came out strongly in favor of Prop. C and was fired for that reason, she “would have a pretty good claim for violation” of the California Labor Code, which protects employees’ right to engage in the political process and prohibits employers from trying to coerce employees to support a particular political view or activity.
But if a worker’s online commentary “veers into the area of criticizing Dorsey for being so opposed to it,” that’s where an employee could face a problem, Hyland said.
In public tweets, Dorsey has been solicitous of others’ opinions about Prop. C, admitting he may be wrong and inviting debate, and Square said the CEO has encouraged discussion of the issue internally as well.
Catherine Bracy, executive director of TechEquity Collaborative, an Oakland nonprofit that seeks to educate and engage Bay Area tech workers on civic issues, said some Square and Stripe employees may fear a backlash not from their bosses but from peers.
“There’s a critical mass of people who work at tech companies who think our industry could be doing better to help the community and wants to be part of the solution, not the problem,” Bracy said. “But those same employees might ask themselves, ‘What can I, this mid-level customer success representative at some large, multinational corporation, really do?’ ”
In October, as Benioff and Dorsey volleyed tweets back and forth, a small group of people gathered outside the South of Market headquarters of Stripe, offering doughnuts and Yes on C campaign literature to Stripe employees. They convened again outside Square headquarters on Market Street, and at Lyft, which donated $100,000 to the No on C campaign.
Not everyone welcomed them. When Jason Prado, a Facebook software engineer who joined the protest, tweeted photos from the rally outside Square’s offices, several Square employees responded in anger. “Can you not lump us all together?” Janaiah McClure, a program manager at Square, tweeted. “I have a voice here.”
David Haley, a Square technical lead, agreed. “There is a very active culture of internal criticism here, leadership gets called out in front of the whole company quite often,” Haley wrote.
“In fact some people are even tired of it,” he said, adding a winking emoticon.
“There is a very active culture of internal criticism here, leadership gets called out in front of the whole company quite often.” Tweet from David Haley, a Square technical lead