Last
Friday, Nov. 2, some 20,000 worldwide employees of the Google division of
Alphabet Inc. walked out at 11:10 AM local time, presumably taking a long weekend
off. The reason? According to the seven core organizers who
published an essay detailing their demands, the proximate cause was the news from
the New York Times that Android
developer Andy Rubin received a $90 million severance package after being
credibly accused of sexual harrassment, and other top executives who were
allegedly guilty of similar escapades have also been let go with generous
golden parachutes. The #MeToo movement
has raised the visibility of such things to the extent that the Google
organizers found enough grass-roots support among both male and female
employees around the world to stage a successful job action that garnered
headlines and brought a promise from Google CEO Sundar Pichai to meet with them
the following week.
As
Bloomberg editorial writer and Harvard law professor Noah Feldman pointed out,
this is not your traditional labor-management strike, with demands from a
homogeneous group of laborers for higher pay and shorter hours. Feldman likens it more to a student protest
at a university aimed at a cultural or value issue such as racism, sexism, or whatever
the popular -ism of the day happens to be.
For example, students last March staged protests about gun control, a
subject that their universities have relatively little say in.
I
partly buy Feldman's argument, but partly not.
He's
right in that this is something new in the area of labor-management
relations. One novelty is the international
scope of the protest, reaching literally around the world in countries with
radically differing labor laws and cultural milieus of their own. Such international reach is necessary for the
global-capitalist world we live in if a labor action is to be effective against
a multinational corporation. Another
novelty is the type of worker involved:
well-paid professionals (largely engineers), not low-level manual
laborers and semi-skilled workers. A
third novelty is the subject matter of the protest: It is no skin off most workers' personal noses
that Andy Rubin got a $90 million severance package—such an amount is chump
change to Google, and dividing it up among the protesters is not the
point. The point is that a certain type
of wrongdoing—sexual harrassment, in this case—was tolerated by management, and
Google didn't punish the wrongdoers, who were treated financially as well as
any other upper management person leaving the company for a neutral reason. So it's the company's culture and its moral
implications that people are angry about.
But
I part company with Feldman when he says a company can deal with these kinds of
things with little if any economic cost, and can usually even support the
demands themselves without much trouble.
Topping the list of demands the core organizers published was a call to
end forced arbitration and the right to have a "representative of their
choosing" with them to any meeting with Human Resources. Unionized workers will recognize in this a
move toward the standard right of having your union rep with you when you meet with
management about a personnel issue, and to have disputes settled not in
company-provided arbitrators' offices, but by a third party such as a law court
or independent arbitrator. The second
demand was for an end to "pay and opportunity inequity," which sounds
to me like it could cost quite a bit.
The devil is in the details of such inequity and how to fix it, but you
can bet the walkout organizers won't be happy if male engineers get their pay
cut in order to increase the pay of female engineers, for example.
So
in these and the other demands, one can perceive some of the same types of
demands that classic unions such as the AFL-CIO imposed on automakers in the
1960s: adjustment of pay inequities and
improvement of working conditions. The
organizers of last week's walkout have carefully refrained from using the word
"union" in any of their statements that I have seen, but if it talks
like a union and acts like a union, they are effectively in the early stages of
forming a union, but one that is very different from the classic national
unions.
Personally,
I am no friend of unions in general, but a saying I came up with while I was
employed at a university which had a faculty union may apply here: "Unions are a sign of bad
management." In a well-run company
that values both the labor and opinions of its employees, management will
create a working environment that is positive enough so that any attempts at
organizing the workers into a union will fail.
(Of course there are underhanded ways of suppressing union organizing,
but I'm not talking about that.) In most
cases of unionized workers, at some point the management has been greedy and
negligent enough that their employees decided to take united action to get justice
from their employer, whether that amounts to an eight-hour day and basic safety
regulations, as it did in the 1930s, or higher standards regarding sexual harrassment
and its consequences, as it does in the 2010s at Google. It looks to me like Google's management has
crossed the line into union-creating territory, and now they're going to have to
deal with the consequences of their actions, or inaction.
Feldman
is right in that this situation may have initiated a new era in
labor-management relations.
Historically, by and large engineers have not been unionized in the U. S., but there are examples
of well-paid professions which are, and arguably to the benefit of the
employees (think airline pilots, who have been unionized for decades). So there is nothing intrinsically
contradictory, illogical, or particularly immoral about a union for
engineers. Perhaps if engineers design a
union, it will leave behind some of the potential for corruption, graft, and
union-management wrongdoing that were endemic in some of the classical unions
like the Teamsters. Instead, maybe engineers
will create lean, mean, and focused virtual labor organizations that form, achieve
their intended purposes, and then go away until the next crisis comes
along. That's how this job action
happened, and the organizers have perhaps found a new path forward for
engineers to assert themselves collectively in the face of soaring executive
compensation and job uncertainty.
Well,
I better quit before I start sounding like a union organizer myself. But the Google walkout is the first instance
of a novel form of labor-management relations that may bear interesting fruit
in the future.
Sources: The demands
of the core organizers of the Google walkout were carried by the website The
Cut at https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-explain-demands.html. The New
York Times article about the sexual-harrassment issues of Andy Rubin and
others can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html. And Noah Feldman's commentary on the
situation was carried by Bloomberg News at https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-02/google-walkout-isn-t-a-traditional-union-workers-strike.
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