Google employees protest to stay the company's watchdog

When Alphabet employees decided to hold protests in their offices this week, there was a big difference compared to the last time the internet giant's employees had staged a protest They were hesitant to use Google products for all their projects. Just one week earlier, two of their colleagues said the company retaliated after staging a massive strike in November. So, instead of using the world's most convenient online communication tools, they opted for encrypted text applications to keep their projects from the potential view of their employer. In less than 24 hours, they staged a sit-in on Wednesday, during which more than 1,000 Googlers in 15 US offices reminded the company that it still had to meet its own needs.

Alphabet's activism reached a dramatic peak in November when 20,000 employees in 50 offices around the world left work to protest how Google's parent company is dealing with the allegations of harassment and harassment. discrimination. But demonstrations within society about how it works and with what's going on for a few years now. Last June, Alphabet decided to stop the construction of artificial intelligence services for a Pentagon UAV program after thousands of employees had signed a petition asking the company to end the contract. And it was not until last August that nearly 1,000 employees signed a petition asking Google to remove Project Dragonfly, its project to build a search engine censored in China, which the company was to attack. None of these consequences would have occurred without the mobilization of employees, and current efforts within Alphabet to protect the ability of workers to dissent seem to be underscored by the realization that if anyone really goes Regulating one of the most powerful companies in the world is the talent that helps make it so powerful.

Wednesday's action comes a little over a week after two employees, lead walkout organizers Meredith Whittaker and Claire Stapleton, shared examples of reprisals on Google's internal mailing list. in the months that followed. The walkout, organized to protest serious allegations of sexual assault and harassment by the company and what many employees have described as a culture of impunity for executives, has led to immediate reforms in the workplace. within Alphabet. A few days later, the company agreed to end forced arbitration in cases of charges of sexual harassment or sexual assault, a policy that prevented employees from bringing their grievances to justice. . Workers continued to organize and in February, Google completely eliminated its forced arbitration policy for employees.

But the organizers still felt a sting. Stapleton, a 12-year-old Google veteran at Google, said she was informed that she would be demoted and that she would lose half of the people who reported to her. "I was told to go on sick leave, even though I was not sick," Stapleton wrote in an e-mail to an internal list describing the reprisals she suffered. It was only after hiring a lawyer that Google investigated and decided to reverse its decision to demote it. Whittaker, who heads Google's open research group and co-founded the New York University's AI Now Research Institute, was told that to stay at Google, she needed [her] working on AI ethics and the AI ​​Institute ", according to an email she sent internally. (Google challenges employees' allegations of retaliation.)

Instead of leaving the office in unison Wednesday, Google employees have resorted to various tactics. Some have called for illness a reference to Stapleton's directive to take sick leave. Others have set up an automated e-mail response to detail their grievances about how the company handled the walkout organizers. In cities like New York, Pittsburgh, Cambridge and Mountain View, California, workers have gathered to read accounts shared by employees throughout the company, reporting retaliation for denouncing sexual harassment, rude comments from management, pay discrimination and promotions at Google.

If employees are afraid to speak when they are abused, it will be even harder to talk about the work ethic of Google. Denunciation within technology companies is one of the few levers to empower these conglomerates. Users can complain, but businesses do not have to react. Lawmakers could regulate and force companies such as Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon to be more transparent and more accountable, but this is unlikely to happen any time soon in the United States. After all, technology companies are struggling to stay powerless by spending a lot of money and hiring former public servants to fend for themselves. Last month, Facebook appointed the co-sponsor of the Patriot Act as general counsel. Last year, it was reported that Google had spent all other businesses in the country in an effort to pressure US lawmakers. In the first quarter of this year, Amazon had spent both Facebook and Google trying to influence Washington. Even when European regulators have repressed the excessive practices of technology companies, as in the past three years by imposing fines on Alphabet totaling about $ 9 billion, these are only a few speeding for a company that had $ 137 billion in revenue in 2018 alone.

Google and its peers are huge enough that most of us depend on them to handle the key functions of our daily lives. It's partly because their products are really useful. Google tells us where to go and how to get there. Facebook helps us maintain links within our communities. We rely on software provided by technology companies to guide our work, our relaxation and our learning. Technology companies, like Google, provide the information needed to participate meaningfully in democracy. But these companies have also become so important that they do little checking of their behavior. This put the workers in an important position.

Alphabet might not like his employees forcing him to be better. But as a user of Google products, I appreciate it. When it comes to maintaining one of the most powerful companies in the world in the world, whistleblowers are often all we have. And what's scary is that Google's technology is so ingrained in our lives – Gmail, Chrome, Search, Google Docs, Google Maps, Android – that when something does not please Google, it does not. There is often no other place to go. The employee organization has had important changes so far. Hopefully, in the interest of all those who depend on Google products, this will again be the case.