Should Big Tech pay more to help the homeless in San Francisco?

In San Francisco next week, voters will decide whether the city's largest companies, mostly technology companies, should pay a tax that will raise money to help homeless families. Other cities have tried similar efforts. Seattle voters recently canceled a major employer tax that would have funded affordable housing efforts, and the city's largest technology employer, Amazon, strongly opposed it.

But in San Francisco, the leader of the city's largest technology employer supports a similar measure. Molly Wood has been talking to Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce (and yes, the guy who just bought Time magazine). He fears for the vote measure called Proposition C. He said that Salesforce had recently held its annual Dreamforce conference downtown, and that participants from around the world were horrified by the city's homelessness crisis. The following is a transcript of their conversation.

Marc Benioff: I could tell you how many phone calls and emails and stories I've had from people who have had adverse interactions with [people who are] homeless, terrible situations with the cleanliness of our streets, including the meeting of human excrement and other terrible things. And you just have to ask yourself, "What happened to our big city here?" And that's why I support proposal C.

Molly Wood: You know, in a way, a business tax in San Francisco is actually a tax on the technology sector, which has been criticized for all sorts of problems, including the housing crisis and economic inequality. Do you think that's right? Should this industry take responsibility for the crisis of homelessness and other social problems in San Francisco or elsewhere?

Benioff: Well, I think you know that Salesforce is the biggest employer in the city. And we are also the largest technology company in San Francisco. We are doing very good. Our company is worth about $ 100 billion. The other companies here, add them all up, represent hundreds of billions of dollars. And all this wealth was built at the back of our city. And the question is: do you give back to the city now?

Wood: In a New York Times editorial, you argued that business must have a purpose other than profit, and that it can also be good for business. Milton Friedman has been counter-arguing that companies dealing with social issues can undermine the foundation of a free society. Considering that many CEOs of the technology industry and other industries are more involved in politics – and CEOs like you, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, increasingly control media communication methods – can you see an argument for Friedman's side, the idea of ​​undermining the basis of a free society? Or unexpected consequences, at a minimum?

Benioff: Today, I can tell you that, especially in San Francisco, you can not separate the affairs of our city. You can not tell me that this homelessness problem is not my problem as the city's biggest employer. It's my employees who do not feel safe to get to our transit station. It is our customers who do not feel safe to attend our conferences. Is this situation of homelessness somehow separate from my company? No, the business world is all over the world.

And now, for the other new techniques, Molly follows:

Some 200 Google employees plan to leave work today to protest how the company has handled allegations of sexual misconduct. An article in the New York Times earlier this week indicated that Google had paid $ 90 million to the Android designer Rubin to leave the company, even though an employee had it. accused of sexual behavior. And after that, the company issued a memo stating that it had fired 48 people for sexual harassment in just two years. Another arrived yesterday. A director of Google X is out. He was named in this Times story about inappropriate behavior. None of these 48 people were paid for his departure.

And then on Tuesday in Quartz, the head of Google X gave a lengthy interview explaining that he considered gender equality as "the biggest problem that can be solved by mankind". And he said that men need to listen and change. So that's fine.

Check out the latest episode of The Verge's "Why's That That Button", which discusses my favorite topic: group discussions. Because you know that I think that they represent the future of social networks, I think that Apple must publish iMessage for everyone and become a real competitor on Facebook. The podcast has the director of product management for Facebook Messenger. And, it turns out that Mark Zuckerberg said when calling Facebook's financial results that the news feed would be less important and that ephemeral Stories, Messenger and WhatsApp would be more. So, the vision that Facebook has been proposing for the past 10 years, a huge community of people you barely know and do not agree with, really makes us feel uncomfortable and boring very quickly when all we want is a safe and pleasant place to talk to each other and be friends.