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Tech workers fuel employee activism | Business | Journal Gazette – Fort Wayne Journal Gazette


It was a busy fall for Google workers speaking out against their employer.

On Nov. 27, a group of full-time employees and contractors were campaigning to extend new policy changes for handling sexual harassment allegations to temporary and contract workers, according to a Bloomberg report. The same day, workers made public a petition protesting exploratory plans to build a search engine that complies with China’s online censorship regime.

Earlier in the month, 20,000 Google workers walked off the job worldwide in a widely watched protest over how the company handles sexual misconduct claims, following a bombshell New York Times story about Google’s management of past allegations.

The walkout was repeatedly called a “watershed moment,” one said to represent a significant development in the labor-employer relationship and a new pressure point for tech giants facing a world increasingly distrusting of their businesses.

What’s different about the efforts of these employees – along with those at other firms – is that they’re not merely pushing for traditional labor issues, such as higher wages or better benefits.

Instead, some are publicly questioning their employers’ business decisions, opposing government contracts or bringing up broader moral questions about workplace policies, such as the inclusion of contract workers in an increasingly gig economy and the ethical implications of paying executives millions of dollars following allegations of sexual misconduct.

“It’s increasingly feasible for employees to lead social movements within their organization,” said Jerry Davis, an associate dean at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the tech industry. Those companies, Davis said, don’t own the same kind of tangible assets that those in other industries do.

“If they can’t recruit and retain people that have the rare skills they need, they’re kind of screwed,” he said, giving tech workers power that, even in a tight labor market with low unemployment, is rare.

Besides Google, employees at tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft have posted letters on Medium or signed internal petitions about companies’ government-related work or questioning how their technologies are being used.

Last week, Salesforce announced a “chief ethical and humane use officer” whose job will be “to develop a strategic framework for the ethical and humane use of technology across Salesforce,” according to a news release.

The nature of the tech labor market may help explain why workers feel more empowered to criticize their employers, said Peter Cappelli, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

“Tech workers feel they are special, in part because they are so in demand, in part because their employers treat them that way,” he said in an email. “They also feel that some of their identity is tied up with the image of the company where they work, so it really does hurt them when that image gets tarnished.”

That identity issue may be a reason more workers feel compelled to speak out, management experts said. Employees – particularly younger ones – want their employers to do more to contribute to society, and that expectation is on the rise. A recent survey of 1,000 workers by MetLife, for instance, found that 70 percent said companies should work to address society’s challenges, up from 63 percent last year.

Indeed, many employers – tech companies not least among them – have written mission statements or value creeds that try to weave a broader purpose into their companies’ reason for being.



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