Yahoo Finance TechScape: Netflix and the future of tech employee activism
Two former Netflix employees who criticised comedian Dave Chappelle for comments directed at the trans community in The Closer, a special for the streaming service, have dropped labour complaints related to Netflix’s response to the saga, they announced this week.
The decision brings a close to the most recent chapter of activism at the company and one of the more visible tech industry walkouts in the last few months. But the momentum of internal organising, particularly around social justice issues, has been building for years.
“We are seeing a wave of [employee walkouts],” said Jess Kutch, executive director of the Solidarity Fund, which raises money to support employees engaged in workplace organising (including at Netflix).
In October 2021 alone there were several walkouts in Silicon Valley in addition to the movement at Netflix, including at grocery delivery platform Instacart. And in November, Amazon workers in at least 20 countries staged a strike to demand the company pay higher wages and allow them to join unions.
The groundwork for this particular brand and scale of internal activism was laid in 2018 when more than 20,000 Google employees walked out in response to news the company had given a $90m severance package to an executive forced to step down over sexual misconduct allegations (which he has denied).
While strikes are often focused on wages and working conditions, increasingly workers are taking aim at company ethics and demanding more diversity, progressive policies, and commitments to LGBTQ rights. And they are waging their battles in a public forum, experts say, eschewing the internal pressure campaigns blue collar tech workers have historically relied on.
“There have been isolated examples of this kind of thing for years, but employees are increasingly using the leverage of their labor to stand up for diversity and equity,” said Anastasia Christman, senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project.
Here are some more key examples of worker actions within the growing wave of tech activism in recent years.
Meta
The most prominent and highly-visible recent example of employee activism comes via Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data engineer turned whistleblower who shared thousands of documents with the Wall Street Journal and Congress revealing the company knew of its negative public health impacts and refused to address them.
While Haugen became the face of internal dissent at the company, unrest has been roiling beneath the surface for years. In June 2020, hundreds of employees staged a walkout to protest against the company’s content moderation policies relating to former president Donald Trump.
More recently, Facebook content moderators – who are contracted by employment firm Accenture – staged a mobile billboard targeting the company’s CEO Julie Sweet. The plight of those workers has been covered extensively, with many saying they suffer from PTSD and other mental health problems from poor working conditions and lack of support surrounding the sensitive content they view. From our own Alex Hern:
A group of current and former contractors who worked for years at the social network’s Berlin-based moderation centres has reported witnessing colleagues become “addicted” to graphic content and hoarding ever more extreme examples for a personal collection. They also said others were pushed towards the far right by the amount of hate speech and fake news they read every day.
They describe being ground down by the volume of the work, numbed by the graphic violence, nudity and bullying they have to view for eight hours a day, working nights and weekends, for “practically minimum pay”.
Google’s worker walkouts in 2018 over alleged sexual assault set the stage for other activism in the industry, but it was not the first time employees spoke out against company policies, and actions have grown since then.
Also in 2018, Google discontinued its work on Project Dragonfly, a partnership with China, after protests over government censorship concerns. Social justice-related demands continued in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, during which Google employees demanded the company halt partnerships with police.
Amazon
As the second-largest employer in the United States, the working conditions of Amazon’s more than 1m warehouse employees has become the subject of close scrutiny.
In 2021 one vocal warehouse worker was fired for speaking out against what he called unsafe working conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the company saw a massive unionisation effort in Alabama.
Meanwhile, white collar workers have organised to demand the company halt partnerships with police and improve its policies relating to climate change and the environment.
Apple
Known for its secretive corporate culture, Apple has remained largely unscathed by the rise in employee activism in recent years.
But it recently entered the fray when employees criticised the company’s remote work policies, with a Slack channel called #remote-work-advocacy rising to more than 2,800 members.
From an excellent piece in the Verge, Zoe Schiffer writes:
The Apple value that underpins all of this, elevating the secrecy concerns from an issue of potential lost revenue to one of core company DNA, is “surprise and delight.” It’s the idea that Apple products should catch the public unaware, giving them something they want before they even know they want it.
But the secrecy has bled over into other parts of Apple’s culture, too. Although the company specifically says that its policies “should not be interpreted as restricting your right to speak freely about your wages, hours, or working conditions,” the reality is that there’s a strong expectation that internal problems should be kept internal.
But all that is changing, she reports. In May 2021, a group of female employees organised in response to the company’s hiring of an employee who had in the past written a book with misogynistic descriptions of women. Another group of employees later wrote a letter to CEO Tim Cook asking him to publicly support Palestine.
Apple has not taken the rise in employee activism lightly, and fired an employee in October who was critical of the company’s handling of workplace misconduct allegations and who supported a movement to share personal experiences of discrimination and other labor violations at the company.
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