97
FORTUNE.COM // JUNE .1 .19
working on. “What are Google’s red lines
around censorship and surveillance?” asks
Poulson. “I researched this as much as I
could as an employee and still didn’t know.”
While Maven, Dragonfly, and even the
Rubin payout that gave rise to the walkout
angered employees for different reasons,
there’s at least one connecting thread: se-
crecy. The company that was built around
the value of information sharing had hit
a threshold where a growing number of
decisions were made behind closed doors.
“We’ve always had confidential projects as
a company,” said Pichai at a TGIF, accord-
ing to a transcript of the meeting provided
to Fortune. “I think what happened when
the company was smaller, you had a higher
chance of knowing about it.”
B
UT WHERE GOOGLE management
has increasingly used confi-
dentiality as a tool to maintain
control of decision-making,
some of Google’s activist employees have
gone in the opposite direction—turning to
the media to amplify their concerns.
That’s a dramatic cultural shift for a
company at which talking to the press
without approval once guaranteed you’d be
“viewed as a pariah,” says Liz Fong-Jones.
A former Google site reliability engineer,
Fong-Jones had never had a problem criti-
cizing Google, provided it stayed within the
company’s (virtual) walls.
But in January 2018, her perspective
changed. The catalyst: Google engineer
James Damore’s infamous July 2017 memo,
an internally published 10-page document
arguing that women are underrepresented
in the industry owing to biological dif-
ferences rather than societal factors like
bias, and that the company’s diversity
efforts were discriminatory. The posting by
Damore, who was ultimately fired, created
a furor on Google’s freewheeling message
boards and mailing lists. These internal
communication channels are one of the
oddities of Google’s culture: The company
has tens of thousands of them dedicated to
everything from engineering to all things
cats—run by the so-called Mewglers.
Things got even uglier when Damore
sympathizers leaked comments made on
the message boards by Fong-Jones, a trans woman, and other
Google diversity advocates to right-wing news sites. As a result,
Fong-Jones says, the group was besieged by harassment and violent
threats, which, despite their repeated pleas for help, management
was unable to halt. “We were asking them to stop these malicious
leaks,” she says. Fong-Jones had a proven track record of getting
management to listen to her. She’d successfully spearheaded an
effort to get the company to end its policy requiring people to use
their real names on its social media site Google Plus, convincing ex-
ecutives that such a policy would expose the most vulnerable users
to trolling and worse. But now she felt like the lines of communica-
tion between management and employees had broken down.
It was enough for her to decide that this was a problem that
would not be solved internally. In October 2017, Fong-Jones and
a group of other targeted employees met with Coworker.org, an
organization that usually works with low-wage workers, to help
think through a PR and internal organizing strategy. “It was clear to
us the company wasn’t going to do anything, and we needed to ap-
ply media pressure,” Fong-Jones says. In January she and 14 other
current and former employees talked about the harassment—and
Google’s response to the issue—with Wired.
Understanding that going to Wired without company approval
had broken a Google taboo, members of the group published an
internal post explaining their motivation—and making clear that
they drew a distinction between discussing working conditions (a
protected right under labor law) and leaking information about
Google products or other confidential company information,
which they continued to believe was off limits. Unsurprisingly, not
all of their fellow employees bought the justification: “I got someMICROSOFT
Beginning in
2018, employees
at the software
powerhouse have
protested the
company’s work with
Immigration and
Customs Enforce-
ment, its contract to
provide the U.S. Army
with augmented-
reality headsets,
and its treatment of
female employees.AMAZON
Workers last year
demanded that the
company stop sell-
ing facial recogni-
tion tools to the U.S.
government. In April,
more than 4,500
Amazonians urged
the company to take
action on climate
change—including
ending cloud ser-
vices for oil and gas
companies.SALESFORCE
Last year, workers at
the cloud- computing
company called on
their employer to re-
consider Saleforce’s
contracts with U.S.
Customs and Border
Protection, citing
the Trump adminis-
tration’s family sepa-
ration policy; more
than 650 employees
signed the letter.POWER TO THE PROGRAMMERS?
FORTUNE 5 00
When it comes to employee activism, Silicon Valley is at a crossroads.
At some tech giants (Apple, Facebook, Oracle), workers are still largely
toeing the company line. But others are contending with employees who
seem to be following the Google playbook: