Google workers unite to reject Silicon Valley individualism
The issues that led to the walkout proved too large for any one worker to confront alone
The most remarkable aspect of the walkout at Google on Nov. 1 may not have been that an estimated 20,000 people participated or that it had global reach, or even that it came together in less than a week. It was the way the organizers identified their action with a broader worker struggle, using language almost unheard-of among affluent tech employees.
“This is part of a growing movement,” the organizers wrote in a news release, “not just in tech, but across the country, including teachers, fast-food workers and others who are using their strength in numbers to make real change.”
At the beginning of their protest near the company’s San Francisco offices, the organizers even expressed support for Marriott workers on strike in the city.
For decades, Silicon Valley has been ground zero for a vaguely utopian form of individualism — the idea that a single engineer with a laptop and an internet connection could change the world, or at least a long-established industry. Class-consciousness was passé. Unions were the enemy of innovation, an anchor to the status quo.
But the issues that contributed to the walkout at Google — the company’s controversial work with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence, its apparent willingness to build a censored search engine for China, and above all its handling of sexual harassment accusations against senior managers — proved too large for any one worker to confront alone, even if that worker made mid-six figures. They required a form of solidarity that would be recognizable to the most militant 20th-century labour organizers.
“The myth of Silicon Valley is that all the power you need is embodied in you as an individual — if you want more money, go somewhere else,” said Harley Shaiken, a labour expert at the University of California, Berkeley.
“What they were saying here was that all the economic power they had as individuals wasn’t enough.”
And the consequences of that dawning realization, Shaiken and other labour experts said, could reverberate across the entire tech sector.
Tech executives have long maintained that unions are inefficient — Intel co-founder Robert Noyce once described unions as an existential threat — and that skilled tech workers don’t need formal protections because employers can’t afford to alienate them. Many tech companies also promote themselves as inherently pro-worker because they are less hierarchical, and more democratically run, than old-economy businesses.
Google, for example, points to countless ways for workers to communicate with senior executives: Employees can raise a concern with the chief executive at a TGIF meeting that happens a few times each month. They can ask questions on an internal company platform before meetings, and management will respond to the ones that receive the most “upvotes.” Workers can even circu- late petitions, and those that prove especially popular can earn their authors a sit-down with management.
Underlying the back-andforth is the belief that truth bubbles up from an unregulated exchange of ideas. But some employees complain that it rarely leads to lasting change.
“As far as mechanisms for expressing feelings, there are plenty of them,” said Meredith Whittaker, a12-year Google veteran who oversees a research group at the company and helped organize the walkout. “But as far as opportunities for agency and power — for real power over decision-making — some of what you’re seeing is a recognition that the former doesn’t equal the latter.” When The New York Times reported in late October that Google had given a high-ranking official a $90-million (U.S.) payout as he left the company after allegations of sexual harassment, organizers said, it ignited these simmering frustrations.
The question is how far this sense of individual powerlessness has spread within Google. The walkout organizers argue that the feeling is quite widespread — extending from software developers to hardware engineers and from employees to contractors.
Some observers agree. Michelle Miller, co-founder of CoWorker.org, which educates workers in tech and other industries on how to assert their labour rights, said that employees at Google “had to start thinking of themselves as some kind of collective” last year after a memo by an employee asserted that women tend to be innately less capable of certain technical work.
She said that workers who criticized the memo and defended diversity efforts on internal forums were threatened by people sympathetic to the memo’s author, James Damore, and had to band together to defend one another.
Since Damore’s ouster, Google workers have steadily received evidence that management will only heed collective action, Miller argued. That includes an ad hoc worker revolt that preceded the end of the company’s controversial Pentagon contract. Google may have been uniquely vulnerable to a worker uprising given its progressive values, including the company’s longtime exhortation, “Don’t be evil,” and the openness of its corporate systems.
Organizers note that they executed the entire walkout using Google’s internal platforms and other company resources.
They say they’re confident that the protests will only escalate if the chief executive, Sundar Pichai, and his team don’t put forth a plan to act on some of their demands.
“The myth of Silicon Valley is that all the power you need is embodied in you as an individual.” HARLEY SHAIKEN LABOUR EXPERT