For a long time, Google was the place to work. It didn’t matter that employees left quickly. Many people wanted to work for Google, so the company never had to worry about churn. However, some workers don’t want to leave. They love what they’re doing, and want to stay for their projects, without the threat of sexism, racism, harassment, or retaliation for speaking up about those problems. Those employees have formed a union.
The Alphabet Workers Union, named for Google’s parent company, Alphabet, could be one of the first unions for software engineers. In an industry that often asks employees to work 6 or more days a week, for more than 8 hours a day, on top of one that’s rife with sexism, racism, harassment, prejudice, and undervalued work, it’s about damn time.
In This Article:
Google’s Dilemma
Photo: Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press
It seems Google’s in the news for mistreating employees once a month. The U.S. Department of Labor believes Google has broken laws around retaliation and mistreatment of female employees. The diversity at Google, despite being a company that claims to work hard on diversity, still isn’t great. Besides the massive data Google’s collecting, a privacy nightmare, they’re doing things with that data that customers wouldn’t approve of, all in the name of selling ads.
Discrimination and Harassment
Perhaps there has been no more prevalent complaint against Google than the discrimination and harassment women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people have faced at the company. To be fair to Google, these are issues that spread far and wide, even outside of the tech industry. However, Google has gone out of their way to fire abuse victims and give harassers promotions or golden parachutes as they leave. The company treats harassment like it is solely a PR problem. If the public doesn’t know about it, it’s not a problem.
Google’s diversity numbers in leadership aren’t much different than the rest of the tech industry. They’re worse in the engineering departments, which Google doesn’t even report for this reason.
Women have reported a toxic workplace where they’re harassed and hit on. Some leave. looking at Google’s leadership statistics, it’s clear to see that women are held back in their careers at Google as a result of sexism. The same goes for POC. Meanwhile, those who protested this discrimination and harassment found their projects drying up, being forced to resign from their jobs, or just being outright fired.
Ethics in AI
Dr. Timnit Gebru, fired former Google AI ethics researcher. Photo: Kimberly White/Getty
Google’s slogan used to be “Don’t be evil.” That got too difficult to live up to, so they dropped it. After all, what else would you call aiding in the Trump administration’s family separation on the border, giving a censored version of Google search to the Chinese government, or developing AI for the Defense Department to track people using drone footage? Some of those might be in gray areas, but when your own ethics researchers find evidence of racism, sexism, and exclusion in your AI, surely the non-evil answer isn’t “fire the ethics researchers.”
When your own employees raise concerns about issues, especially employees who are literally being paid to find those ethics issues, and you fire them, you’re definitely being evil.
But that’s okay now, because “Don’t be evil” isn’t Google’s slogan anymore.
Contractors Outnumber Salaried Employees
More people on Google’s payroll have to report the hours they work than those who are expected to—let’s face it—always be available for work. We have “on call” rotations. Yes, like doctors. It also means that there are employees who are paid less than their coworkers, even if they’re doing similar or even the same job. Contractors also don’t receive the same benefits or compensation as salaried Google employees. They’re also more likely to be immigrants or minorities.
Google has been failing their contractors for some time, blaming the contracting companies rather than guaranteeing certain protections by requiring all partners to live up to their standards. However, the new Alphabet Workers Union welcomes contractors, and could give them the representation that Google has denied them.
Google Used to be Better With Female Representation
Things have been getting worse at Google. They struggled to retain women last year more than the year before. Female employees are leaving.
Emily Chang’s “Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley” had a chapter early in the book dedicated to Google. It was the third chapter, entitled, “Google: When Good Intentions Aren’t Enough.” Google was always a predominantly-male company. However, early on, it made efforts to hire more women. It took the concerns of women seriously. For example, when two female employees—one of whom being Marissa Mayer, former Yahoo CEO and founder of Lumi Labs—found a potential hire they were interviewing rubbed them the wrong way, they realized his sexism wasn’t just an issue with one interviewer. They brought the issue to Google’s founders. Not only did Google pass on the potential hire, they realized that women should be a part of the interview process to find these problems that men may not notice.
Google doesn’t ask their female employees into all interviews anymore. It just became too much for women on the team, who were outnumbered by a wide and growing margin. They also stopped having female employees lead a re-evaluation of female potential employees who fell out of the interview process, possibly due to the increased scrutiny female engineers face. Since then, they’ve hired people who have been large problems for the company due to sexism and racism, like James Damore.
Google had a solution that wouldn’t have been as taxing on women if they weren’t such a minority at the company. Instead, they allowed one problem to make another, causing hiring of women to stagnate. Few women even reach promotion, either through sexist notions of what a manager should look like, or because they leave the toxic environment.
The Whole Software Industry is a Mess
Microsoft has a long history of sexism.
Google’s not alone. While the software industry has many companies with good relationships with their employees, many do not. Cyberpunk 2077 delivered late with a lot of bugs. But how did the company get their product ready in time? Crunch time. It’s when you take the amount you can normally do in a month and cram it into a week! Not only is it tiring, it produces bad results. In a 24 hour hackathons, I’ve built some pretty awesome apps… that I would never release. Because they’re awful. I built them in a night and they have every bad code smell known to mankind! That’s what crunch releases are. Often, these kind of products introduce another problem, something you’ll be fighting for the lifetime of the project: tech debt.
Tech debt is when a project needs some infrastructure work, but technically still works. It could be bugs, outdated libraries, inefficient algorithms, some threads that should definitely not be doing computational work because it’ll slow the user interface, that sort of thing. Engineers love getting rid of tech debt. It’s like that feeling you get after you clean your entire apartment and don’t have to jump over delivery boxes to get to your refrigerator anymore. But product teams are all “go, go, go!” They just need new features after new features, rushing engineers. It’s stressful. Putting that kind of stress on an engineering team doesn’t just become internalized either. It can lead to outbursts, arguments, and manifest itself in toxic traits, like misogyny. Happy engineers make better projects. They’re also just better people in general.
Prejudice Everywhere
It’s not just at Google. Women face tougher interviews, have their work scrutinized more, and have a harder time getting promotions or raises everywhere. It’s a huge problem in fields traditionally thought of as “men’s work.” STEM, that is, science, technology, engineering, and math, tend to judge women more harshly than their male counterparts. Women in tech face a constant uphill battle to prove themselves, often to face huge setbacks from the tiniest of mistakes. Hit your sprint goals for two months without issue, but go over schedule on one project, and it comes up during your reviews.
It was found that female musicians did better in auditions for parts in an orchestra when those judging couldn’t tell the gender of who they were judging. As a result, “blind auditions” have become increasingly popular. They give female musicians the same opportunities as men. Women in tech never get that, they just get the extra judgement.
It’s not limited to women either. Black, Latino, Indigenous, and other people of color face the same uphill battles for respect and understanding. It’s intersectional as well. Issues that face one group are multiplied across marginalized groups. Every aspect makes difficulty, harassment, and issues with pay and promotion multitudes worse.
Management Disengaged
Often, management is disconnected from the issues. Either they’re too far detached from the programming world to realize that they’re pumping out products without quality, or they didn’t face the same issues as marginalized employees as they climbed up their career ladder. They may not realize that their workforce has become so homogeneous. Maybe they just don’t see the problem with that. Either way, management seems content to continue the patterns that prop them up because, frankly, it’s a competitive world in tech. But that doesn’t mean we should be comfortable with a system that helps some cheat while holding others back.
Recently, a not-insignificant terrorist attack at our Capitol, lead by Trump supporters and men wearing shirts that proclaimed themselves to be Nazis, caused trouble for an employee at GitHub who called them… Nazis. He was fired for anti-racist and anti-Nazi remarks. He’s suing, currently, which is good, but it doesn’t undo the damage he’s facing and potential harassment once he’s inevitably doxxed. He stated he’s not sure he wants to work in tech anymore. It’s a system that threw him to the wolves for telling his fellow Jewish GitHub employees to stay safe in Washington D.C., where the Nazis were gathering. It’s a system we must break down.
A Different Kind of Union
“This union builds upon years of courageous organizing by Google workers. From fighting the ‘real names’ policy, to opposing Project Maven, to protesting the egregious, multi-million dollar payouts that have been given to executives who’ve committed sexual harassment, we’ve seen first-hand that Alphabet responds when we act collectively. Our new union provides a sustainable structure to ensure that our shared values as Alphabet employees are respected even after the headlines fade.”
– Nicki Anselmo, Program Manager
Unions often only function once they have a majority or large portion of the employees at a company as members. The point is to have a large bargaining chip when discussing issues with employers. However, in this case, the Alphabet Worker’s Union is only a small piece of Google. Still, they’re looking to improve problems at Google by organizing members, and they’re doing so with the help from an existing union, the Communications Workers of America and their CODE-CWA project (Coalition to Organize Digital Employees). While the CWA primarily covers journalists, they’re moving to cover digital and tech-space workers as well.
Instead of having no centralized group for discussing issues at Google, employees will now have the union. This will serve as an organization platform, but also a way to pressure Google. While they won’t bring ideas to the negotiating table, as is customary with unions, they’ll be able to pressure the business through reaching out to employees and members of the press, to make them aware of problems. They’ll be able to bring Google to the court of public opinion.
The AWU can hurt Google’s public relations, hiring abilities, and stock prices. While they can’t, alone, stage a large walkout, they can bring non-union employees in to walkouts, like the 20,000+ employee walkout Google suffered over its rewarding of sexual abusers. This will be a tool to improve workers’ rights at Google, even if it happens slowly and through less conventional means.
Members of the Alphabet Workers Union will contribute 1% of their salary to the cause. For many of Google’s employees, that will come to over $100/year. The funds can help the union grow, gain attention, and be the thorn in Google’s side that employees need it to be. The union could grow, use its funds for lobbying, or simply change public opinion of Google.
Fixing the Problem
Employees walking out of Google’s campus in California. Photo: Mason Trinca/Getty Images
We just saw the first step towards fixing tech: unions. Google employees formed the Alphabet Workers Union to help them solve these problems at Google. If they’re successful, it could lead to changes in the rest of the tech industry. For too long, the complaints of engineers have been dismissed. This is largely due to the age and gender of the people making the most complaints, it’s largely young women. Still, measures to make software development better will work for everyone.
We’re going to need more than unions, but a policy and cultural shift as well. We’ll need improvements to training, as well as harsher punishments for those who make an unwelcoming workplace. Companies can’t be allowed to retaliate against employees who bring problems forward.
Software engineers are quickly becoming the blue collar workers of the tech workspace. You’d think the experts in the room would be at the top of the totem pole, but they’re just not. In fact, many have come to call their workplaces “feature factories.” They pump out features, without much care about maintaining or improving infrastructure. Often, this leads to outages and other large problems at companies, increasing engineers’ workloads without inconveniencing those who made the decisions. It saves time in the long run to focus on tech debt more often and listen to ethical, privacy, or security issues they raise. We also have to do away with the 24/7 availability workplace. Engineers are asked to be “always on,” and, during “crunch time,” they’re working exceedingly long hours with no improvement to pay or benefits. These longer hours aren’t optional either, they’re forced.
Software engineering has often been considered a great way to make a living. It pays well, and healthcare benefits are, more often than not, good. But engineers are treated as disposable. Any pushback against bad products, like unethical AI or releasing broken features, and employees risk their jobs. Women stay silent about sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace, because companies retaliate against women who speak up. Nowhere is that more true than Google.
The Alphabet Worker’s Union is young, and it’s one of the first of its kind, but it could lead to a world that’s built on software to be built well, and without ethical issues. It could help make software engineering the worker’s utopia it was always supposed to be.
Sources:
- Bobby Allyn, NPR
- Alphabet Workers Union
- Kate Conger, The New York Times
- Steve Dent, Engadget
- Megan Rose Dickey, TechCrunch
- Google Diversity Report, 2020
- Chriss Mills Rodrigo, The Hill
- Zoe Schiffer, The Verge