Anti-Trump activism latest Tech start-up
Grass-roots groups flexing their muscle
Maryam Aghamirzadeh accomplished a lot in her 30-plus-year high-tech career. She produced goods and services. She created jobs. And she generated economic value.
These days, she’s determined to make something else: change. She’s donating her time to a new grass-roots organization opposing the Trump administration, Tech Stands Up, to fight for causes about which she cares deeply, such as women’s rights, immigration and environmental protection.
“I have never seen this kind of mobilization” in the tech industry, says Aghamirzadeh, 58, a retired Cisco Systems executive and software engineer who immigrated to the U.S. from Iran. “I think it’s the first time we have seen it coming from the bottom up.”
She’s part of a new wave of political activism sweeping Silicon Valley. For the first time, legions of tech workers are on the front lines in what Aghamirza- deh and others in Silicon Valley are calling a political awakening. Mobilization in the form of rallies, volunteering time and skills, fundraising and even the threat to walk off their jobs is bubbling up here. In the process, the rank and file are joining forces with outside organizations to create a broad coalition they hope can flex political muscle in Washington.
More than 1,200 Silicon Valley technology workers in the Bay Area are planning to walk off the job on March 14, turning a special day for math geeks into a protest against President Trump.
During the waning moments of Super Bowl LI, a group of 100 tech workers gathered to lay out a plan of attack against Trump’s immigration ban. The new group, Tech Solidarity, raised $30,000 in funding for three legal aid groups and discussed how to sway reluctant tech executives.
Next week, another group of social activists in Silicon Valley, the Tech Workers Coalition, whose 40 members include employees from Facebook, Google and Twitter, is planning a “No Ban No Wall No Registry” rally in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood.
Silicon Valley workers — often derided as disengaged and narcissistic on HBO’s namesake sitcom — are “exerting power from within their company,” says Matt Schaefer, a spokesman for Tech Workers Coalition.
And they are turning up the pressure on their employers to more forcefully push back against administration policies such as the recent immigration ban.
“The things (Trump) is proposing goes against everything Silicon Valley stands for: openness, equality,” says Brad Taylor, 37, a software engineer with Optimizely who has organized a walkout of 1,200 tech workers next month through Tech Stands Up.
“There is a running joke here that we want to make the world a better place. Now’s our chance.”
The $3.5 trillion tech industry, which had unparalleled access to levers of power during the Obama administration, does not speak with one voice. Not everyone in tech is opposed to Trump or his policies.
“Trump is changing all the rules,” and tech should embrace the “instability and uncertainty” he brings, says J.J. Thompson, 35, CEO of Rook Security in Indianapolis. He attended Trump’s inauguration last month and says Trump should appeal to entrepreneurs because, like them, he’s a risk-taker.
The tech industry’s opposition underscores a chasm between a workforce highly concentrated on the coasts and Middle America, where Trump won handily in the election, say academics. Silicon Valley, which is pioneering technologies and automation that will eliminate American jobs, has been blamed for being perilously out of touch with what matters to much of the country.
“Middle America is worried about jobs and protectionism, and Silicon Valley is just another example of the things it is afraid of,” says Irene Bloemraad, a sociology professor at the University of California-Berkeley.
“Silicon Valley won’t change their hearts and minds.”
Energized programmers aren’t the only ones hitting the pavement. Workers from Comcast and drivers from Uber have also protested the ban on immigrants from mostly Muslim countries.
“This is what is possible when tech workers galvanize and get engaged on national issues,” says Catherine Bracy, co-founder and executive director at TechEquity Collaborative, a community-activist group. “They are a silent majority of sorts but one that is now more civically activated.”
The tech workers in question are young and old, software engineers, product managers, lawyers and marketing professionals. They represent companies that make some of the world’s best known products as well as lesser known hopefuls.
On nights and weekends, Mark Rose, a product leader at Alphabet’s Nest, is working to organize technology workers and build coalitions with Tech Stands Up. He’s also building an online platform where technology workers can vote up the issues that matter to them, be it immigration or network neutrality, to present the issues that matter most to the technology community.
Rose says he’s not surprised by the outpouring from tech workers looking to volunteer their time or the high-fives he gets on Google’s Silicon Valley campus, even from employees he doesn’t know. Opposition to the Trump administration is Silicon Valley’s new start-up, he says.
“Most of Silicon Valley works like this. It’s every start-up ever,” Rose says of his work on Tech Stands Up. “When people join the group, they say, ‘Where do we start?’ And we say, ‘It’s just like a start-up. Find something. Do something. Get something done.’ It’s very grass-roots, and it’s rely- ing heavily on people communicating with each other very quickly.”
“We’re in the midst of a grassroots movement,” says Daniel Hanley, a security-software engineer for IBM in Atlanta who started an online petition and has collected 1,625 signatures — most of them from Big Blue employees, some of them from unnamed executives — in protest of CEO Ginni Rometty’s open letter to Trump in November about creating jobs.
“We are disappointed that IBM CEO Ginni Rometty’s open letter to President-elect Donald Trump does not affirm IBMers’ core values of diversity, inclusiveness and ethical business conduct,” the petition begins. Hanley says the petition will be delivered to IBM management soon. It has gained momentum since Trump signed his executive order on travel last month, Hanley says.