99
FEEDBACK [email protected] FORTUNE.COM // JUNE .1 .19
through, she says, “then we’ve done that
greater good that we came to Google to do.”
In April, the conflict inside the company
reached a new level when Whittaker and
Claire Stapleton, two women instrumen-
tal in planning the walkout, published an
open letter accusing Google of retaliating
against them for their organizing activities.
Whittaker wrote that after the A.I. council
was disbanded, she was told that in order to
remain at the company, she would have to
abandon her work on A.I. ethics at Google
as well as at the AI Now Institute, an out-
side organization she cofounded. Stapleton
said that after almost 12 years at Google,
she was told two months after the walkout
that she would be demoted and later that
she should go on medical leave, even though
she wasn’t sick. It wasn’t until she hired a
lawyer that Google conducted an investiga-
tion and walked back her demotion, she
wrote. “We’re tapping into something that’s
an existential threat to Google,” Stapleton
told Fortune. The company responded to
their accusations that day with a statement
saying there was no retaliation and that it
prohibits “retaliation in the workplace and
investigates all allegations.”
To some employees, the charges of
retaliation are the most serious yet levied
against the company. Much of the organizing efforts have been led
by site reliability engineers (SREs). Their remit is to operate the
most critical services Google runs. When something breaks, they’re
the ones who get paged to fix it. They troubleshoot and diagnose
problems, and they are expected to have opinions and questions.
“You have to go probe for weaknesses,” says Fong-Jones, who was
an SRE, “and also challenge people when you think something
that they’re trying to railroad through is not okay.” Within the SRE
world, there’s a concept called blameless postmortem—it’s a way of
looking back at mistakes made without throwing anyone under the
bus. “It’s a fundamental part of the culture at Google,” says Tariq
Yusuf, a privacy engineer who’s been with the company almost five
years. “It’s an ability to say this is a thing that’s wrong.” Retaliation,
he says, removes the core barrier of being able to safely raise issues.
“The whole process breaks down.”
The organizers have started to label their tactics as labor orga-
nizing, which some had previously avoided, fearing that it would
be off-putting to a workforce that had traditionally aligned itself
more with management. During Maven, a few employees went on
“interview strikes,” declining to participate in interviewing and re-
cruiting candidates—a form of protest they accelerated in response
to the retaliation claims. On May 1, International Workers’ Day, six
months after the walkout, employees embraced another old-school
labor organizing strategy, staging a sit-in to address retaliation.
In New York, the mood was somber, almost vigil-like. A couple
hundred employees gathered to talk about the different kinds of
retaliation they said they had faced: for organizing, for reporting
sexual harassment. Some cried. There was even talk of forming a
union. “We’re not walking back our gains,” says Whittaker, “and
we’re not going to shut up.”DO NO EVIL?
Claire Stapleton is one of two
Google employees who have accused
the company of retaliation.
(Google denies the allegations.)