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FORTUNE.COM // JUNE.1.19
And in an attempt to quell the increase in
uncivil interactions on its internal plat-
forms, its new “community guidelines” ban
slurs and references to sex acts in any work
document and require every online group
to have a moderator, who must go through
training. The company has also revamped
internal reporting channels for issues like
sexual harassment.
The Google organizers have taken to call-
ing themselves the “entitled vocal major-
ity,” after one employee publicly referred
to them as the “entitled vocal minority.”
No matter its size, there’s no denying the
group has been impactful, playing a role in
Google’s decision to not renew its contract
for Project Maven. The company also has
killed Dragonfly, saying there are no plans
to launch search in China and that no work
is being undertaken on such a project.
Google has also pulled out of its sponsor-
ship of the Conservative Political Action
Conference—it irked the company’s liberal
employees to see the company’s logo next
to the NRA’s—and disbanded its artificial
intelligence ethics council after employees
published an open letter contesting the ap-
pointment of the president of conservative
think tank the Heritage Foundation.
Google employees have started to flex
their power beyond the company too. The
one walkout demand Google met was do-
ing away with forced arbitration, which re-
quired employees settle their disputes with
the company behind closed doors. A group
of Googlers has taken the fight to Washing-
ton, where it is pushing for legislation that
would ban the practice. “Congress people
take meetings with Google workers that
they didn’t take with Chipotle workers,”
says Vicki Tardif, an ontologist at Google,
who has been with the company for eight
years. If they’re able to help push somethingnegative comments along the lines of, this really sucks for you, but
why did you air Google’s dirty laundry?” says McMillen, one of the
then-Google employees who spoke to Wired.
One reason Fong-Jones says she takes a hard line against product
leaks is that they provide management with a strong justification
for sharing less information with employees. Some point to what
happened last August as a prime example. Brin and Pichai were
addressing the weekly TGIF meeting when it became clear that
someone in the room or watching the livestream of the event was
leaking what was being said to a New York Times reporter—who
was tweeting the discussion, in real time, to the world at large.
One employee stood up and said “Fuck you!” to the anonymous
leaker, to the applause of his colleagues. “That ruined TGIF for-
ever,” says McMillen. “Nothing of interest is going to be said
at TGIF anymore.”
When he left Google, Poulson says he was warned against talk-
ing to the media. “I was explicitly told that should I ever want
to come back to the company, they could ignore my politics and
focus on my technical contribution as long as I didn’t do some-
thing as unforgivable as speak to the press,” he told Fortune. “To be
blunt, I don’t think they will be happy I’m having this phone call
with you.”
A
HEAD OF THE WALKOUT, Pichai sent out a memo to em-
ployees voicing his support and acknowledged at a
conference that day that Google had not always gotten
it right. “There’s anger and frustration within the
company,” he said. “We all feel it. I feel it too.” At headquarters
in Mountain View, CFO Ruth Porat joined the walkout with her
team. Other executives simply avoided the question of whether to
participate. Fitzpatrick told Fortune she had been out of the office
that day and declined to revisit it when asked if she would have
participated had she been on campus.
Parts of the corporate response rubbed organizers the wrong
way. They viewed executives’ embrace as an attempt to recast the
walkout as some sort of sanctioned company picnic. And if Porat
supported the walkout, some asked, why didn’t she use her power
as a C-suite executive to implement their demands?
Both McMillen and Fong-Jones quit not long after, saying they
found the company’s response lackadaisical. For Fong-Jones, the
biggest disappointment was the company’s unwillingness to com-
ply with the organizers’ demand to put a worker representative on
the board. “Employees are in a really good position to understand
the issues,” she says. She was happy people were staying to fight,
but she was burned out.
Google management has shown a willingness to listen to employ-
ees—and, in some cases, to change. The company says it had become
over-reliant on TGIF and is now too big and sprawling to address
every issue in the weekly one-hour meeting. It’s experimenting with
adding different forums, like town halls focused on single topics,
such as its recently published diversity report. “That was a realiza-
tion that we came to as we started to see people raising their hands
and saying, ‘My voice isn’t getting heard enough,’ ” says Fitzpatrick.
ALPHABET CIVIL WAR
SUNDAR PICHAI : Google CEO