The Rise Of Employee Activism

With Us Tech Employees Protesting About ‘unethical’ Contracts, How Should The C-suite Stave Off Unrest And Drive Corporate Change?

- Emma Woollacott

The first half of 2018 saw a wave of protests at renowned Silicon Valley firms by staff concerned about the ethical direction their employer was taking. In April, thousands of Google workers, including senior engineers, signed a petition asking CEO Sundar Pichai to cancel Project Maven, a contract with the Pentagon that involved the use of AI to better interpret camera footage from drones. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” the petition read. Engineers refused to build one of the security tools involved, and some staff even resigned over the matter.

Soon after – in a move almost certainly emboldened by the Google revolt – hundreds of workers at Microsoft signed a similar letter. In this case, staff were protesting the company’s cloud-computing deal with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) because of the agency’s role in separating migrant children from their families at the US–Mexico border.

And it didn’t stop there: Amazon, too, was dragged into the row, with employees demanding that the company stop selling its Rekognition facial recognition software to law enforcement; while Salesforce staff have also been protesting about the company’s work with ICE.

It’s notable that these recent examples have arisen from Silicon Valley, where the applications for new technologies may be hard to predict. As the argument goes, if you take a job at an arms dealer, for example, you know what you’re letting yourself in for; start developing facial recognition technology for a retailer, however, and you might well be surprised to see it being used by law enforcement.

Another reason for the high level of employee activism in the tech industry is the sheer power of these highly skilled workers, explains Charles Wookey, CEO of not-for-profit organisation A Blueprint for Better Business.