How the tech industry soured on employee activism

By Zoë Schiffer • 16 May 2024

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A former Google employees speaks about the company's Project Nimbus last month in Berkeley, CA. (Tayfun Coskun / Getty Images)

When social justice protests swept the country in 2020, tech companies mostly welcomed employee activism. The Gaza demonstrations are getting a much different reception

I.

In the early aughts, a dominant cultural philosophy in Silicon Valley, at least from an employer branding perspective, was “bring your whole self to work." Popularized by a 2015 Ted Talk, the sentiment was not intended to be taken literally: your whole self needed to be productive, and professional, and not too radical in its politics. But the idea stands in stark contrast to the one that has replaced it: that only the part of yourself that gets work done should come to the office. Those who bring in anything else may be promptly shown the door.

Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the corporate response to employee activism over Israel and Gaza: in the past two months alone, Apple allegedly disciplined retail employees for wearing pro-Palestine paraphernalia, Google fired 50 employees in connection with protests about Israel, and Meta removed Workplace posts from employees voicing support for people in Gaza,

It’s no accident that declining tolerance for employees’ political speech has coincided with the tech industry’s self-described era of efficiency. As companies continue to conduct mass layoffs, and the hiring process remains slow and arduous, employers have more leverage than at any time since the pandemic began.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that employees should engage in activism only during non-work hours. But separating work and life isn’t always easy in a post-pandemic world, where many people work from home and routinely feel each sphere of life bleeding into the other. As the war in Gaza continues to roil workplaces across the country, I find myself doubtful that such a neat separation is possible — and curious about what the downstream impacts will be on both employees and the companies they work for.

“Increasingly, we’re seeing employers have to grapple with a thornier set of issues, because employees are using political activism as a cudgel against management,” says Bruce Barry, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, who specializes in workplace rights. “Just look at Google firing workers and issuing statements about what they do and don't want happening in the workplace. It’s so interesting because not that long ago, Google was a place where they were cultivating open dialogue about anything and everything.”

To help puzzle this out — and to understand what has changed since the George Floyd protests in 2020, when tech companies were likelier to celebrate their employees’ activism — I spoke to employees at Coinbase, Google, Apple, and Amazon, to get their thoughts about the tech industry’s evolving stance on employee speech.

II.

In 2020, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong published a memo dictating his company’s new attitude toward workplace activism. “Be company first,” he wrote. He encouraged his staff to put “the company’s goals ahead of any particular team or individual goals.” Later, he added that Coinbase would not focus much on issues outside its core mission. It also wouldn’t engage on broader societal issues or “advocate for any particular causes or candidates internally that are unrelated to our mission.” Armstrong encouraged employees who didn’t align with this approach to take a severance package and leave.

The memo was instantly polarizing inside and outside Coinbase. It came during a moment when protests over police brutality had captivated the country and companies were reckoning with accusations of racism in the workplace. Diversity and inclusion hadn’t yet resulted in meaningful changes for many underrepresented minorities in tech, despite how often it was mentioned on company websites.

“Why stay and put effort into this work if it’s just tokenized into recruiting points and not actually improving the sense of belonging and psychological safety,” wrote a Coinbase employee on Slack, according to messages viewed by the New York Times.

Shortly after, the employee resigned, along with about 60 of her colleagues. At the time, Coinbase had around 600 employees.

The policy makes sense on paper — but it misses what happens when politics become personal. Vanderbilt’s Barry says he likes to show his class the Coinbase policy and ask if they think it’s good. “Students often say ‘yeah!’” he noted. “The point they're missing is, this policy works well until it doesn’t,” he added. “Firms get compelled into certain issues they can't necessarily depoliticize.”

Four years later, I was curious how the company has changed since Armstrong published his memo.The company has continued to track employee engagement through an annual survey, and says that employees generally report being happier than they were in 2020.

“The survey results indicate a steady rise in our collective sense of belonging since adopting our mission-driven strategy,” L.J. Brock, the company's chief people officer, wrote in an email to Platformer. “In our latest survey, 86 percent of employees expressed a strong sense of belonging. Additionally, those who feel a strong sense of belonging are twice as likely to remain with Coinbase and four times more engaged overall.”

I asked a Coinbase spokesperson if the company’s workplace racial diversity had declined since the memo came out.

“Our workforce demographics have remained unchanged since transitioning to a Mission First approach,” Brock said in a statement. “As a remote-first organization, we have a global presence, drawing talent from diverse locations worldwide, not just major cities.”

There is likely a bit of a selection bias going on here: Presumably most of the employees who disagreed with Armstrong have left by now, and those who have applied to work there since then know what they’re getting into.

Still, assuming Brock’s data is accurate, it seems notable that the company is as racially diverse today as it was before Armstrong’s memo went out.

III.

Last month, Google employees staged a protest over the company’s involvement in a $1.2 billion cloud contract with the Israeli government. Chris Rackow, the company’s head of global security, said in an internal memo to employees that protestors “took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers.” Employees I spoke with said the protests were more peaceful than Rackow described them as. Regardless, 50 people involved were fired.

Sundar Pichai followed up with a note addressing the event, according to Business Insider. In a section titled “mission first” — and in an echo of Armstrong’s 2020 memo — Pichai wrote: "This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics. This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted."

One current Google employee I spoke with said the “mission first” policy stifles important discussions and limits worker power. He asked for anonymity as he’s not authorized to speak publicly about the company.

“The distraction is the point,” the employee explained. “In a perfect world, we would all be able to come into work, and everything would be great, and we could focus on work and have conversations about the weather. But that’s not the case. If your company is building an office in a place that’s limiting your rights as a woman, that’s probably going to matter to you.

"I think that’s why companies don't like these conversations," the employee continued. "Because if you have these conversations with colleagues and say ‘I’m not comfortable with this decision the company made, how do you feel?’ and people start realizing no one likes the decision, and then start questioning the decision, suddenly you might get employees unionizing and exerting actual pressure to try and influence that decision. And that’s the last thing companies want.”

The employee said that the constant threat of layoffs had likely dampened more widespread pushback to Google’s cloud projects with Israel. “Questions from employees about layoffs come up at nearly every company all hands,” he said. “It’s constantly been on top of mind for a lot of people since last year.”

I asked the employee whether a more permissive view toward employee speech would necessitate tolerance toward people like James Damore, the engineer who wrote the infamous 2017 memo regarding diversity and inclusion and the biological differences between men and women, and who Google subsequently fired.

He said, in a roundabout way, no. “It comes down to tolerance of intolerance,” he said. “If you try to make everyone feel accepted and welcome, you won’t actually create a welcoming environment for most people. So you have to decide if you want to create an environment that’s welcoming to people with antiquated opinions or not.”

Which opinions are “antiquated,” of course, is highly subjective.

IV.

Apple, unsurprisingly, has had no such workplace demonstrations over Gaza. Among the tech giants, the company stands out as being proudly hierarchical and unabashedly hostile toward employee speech. In the weeks following October 7, a handful of Apple employees who weren’t previously engaged in large Slack channels related to Jewish and Muslim employee resource groups started popping in and posting antagonistic messages toward each other. Apple promptly shut down the channels, Platformer has learned.

Employees I spoke to weren’t particularly upset — or even surprised — at the move. A likely difference here is in employee expectations. For the most part, Apple workers don’t bank on being able to speak freely about politics or even working conditions. When they’ve tried to push back against policies like returning to the office, those attempts have largely been quashed by management. Apple routinely shuts down Slack channels, citing breaches to its employee code of conduct.

In April, nearly 400 Apple employees sent an open letter to Tim Cook, asking that he make a statement in support of Palestinian lives. The group behind the letter, Apples4CeaseFire, told Platformer that the signatories are primarily hourly employees who work in retail or for AppleCare.

“On October 9, two days after the loss of innocent Israeli lives, Mr. Cook was quick to send us an email with the subject ‘Israel,’ where he immediately told us that his ‘…heart goes out to the victims, those who have lost loved ones, and all of the innocent people who are suffering as a result of this violence,’” the letter read. “Today, after over 150 days of violence against innocent Palestinian lives, there has yet to be a message sent expressing the same kind of concern for them.”

A week after the letter was released, Deirdre O'Brien, senior vice president of retail, sent retail employees a video acknowledging the “Middle East situation” and promising to match donations to organizations fighting famine in Gaza, Haiti, Mali, Somalia and Ukraine.

In 2022, I predicted that Apple’s corporate culture had permanently changed in the wake of return to office activism. I was wrong. Small pockets of resistance remain, but they’ve gone quiet; unwilling or unable to risk their jobs. Those truly resistant to Apple’s stance have largely left or been fired.

Tariq Ra’ouf, a retail employee in Seattle, said he’s pushing to get more corporate employees involved, but it’s been difficult. “I believe it’s because there’s a greater chance of retaliation and they have more to lose because they get paid more, and the job market is more difficult for an engineer compared to a retail worker,” he noted.

III.

Amazon, which has partnered with Google on the cloud contract with Israel, has faced relatively little public pressure on the subject from employees. Workers there have not staged a walkout, as they did in years past to protest return-to-work mandates and the company’s climate impact.

Still, pressure between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian employees is mounting.

In November, Arab employees organized an event in Amazon’s Toronto office to celebrate Palestinian culture. They spread out a Palestinian flag and set out traditional Middle Eastern desserts. An Israeli employee, offended by the event, printed out posters of those who’d been kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, and tried to share them around, but her colleagues simply ignored her. “Everyone just averted their eyes and pretended they’ve never seen it,” she said on Slack.

Online, discussions between these two factions have gotten more heated. Arab employees say they’ve been reported to HR for mentioning the word “genocide” in Slack or sharing news articles about violence directed at Palestinians. “There’s a complete double standard,” one employee said.

The employee pointed to instances in Slack of other workers saying they felt uncomfortable after seeing a barista at one Amazon office wearing a keffiyeh. “I look at her and assume she’s antisemitic and anti-Israel,” one employee said, according to screenshots reviewed by Platformer. “I saw that too,” a colleague responded. “And honestly felt quite uncomfortable given most of the people chanting to end our existence wear it.”

Prior to the outbreak of violence in October, there were about five Amazon employees involved in No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), a group of tech workers pushing to end contracts with the Israeli government. Now, that number has swelled to around 50, according to an Amazon employee. So far, they appear to be focusing their efforts on supporting Google workers more than on pressuring Amazon executives.

V.

In rereading Armstrong’s memo this week, I was struck first by how levelheaded it seems. In some ways, this is how I think a workplace should function. I myself want to engage in some political causes — but I don’t mind doing them outside work hours. If anything, I value the idea that work is just one part of my life, and that I have time outside of work to pursue my other interests.

But for many employees, politics can feel impossible to separate from their work. Particularly if they feel that their employer is working against their own interests, or their family's interests, as has been the case for many Arab and Muslim workers since the war in Gaza broke out. If Platformer asked me to move to a state that had passed restrictive abortion laws that put my life into danger, I would feel much the same way. 'No politics at work' works only until the politics become personal.

“Employers do have a right, so to speak, to a workplace that’s not completely disrupted by politics and disagreement among the people who work there,” Barry said. “But the remedy isn't to leave all politics at home. It results in a kind of chilling effect, where people don’t want to get involved in civil society even outside of work, because they’re nervous about what their employer will do if they find out. It encourages people to disengage. That's not good for society. For a lot of people, the boundaries between work and non-work are not all that clear.”

I can imagine tech companies continuing to make space for certain types of non-work discussions — I’m reminded of Square hosting forums for employees to discuss police shootings in years past. And I also imagine they will continue to crack down on others — discussions that concern their lucrative government contracts, for example.

And as long as the steady drumbeat of layoffs continues, this strategy will likely succeed. Tech companies are happy to serve as platforms for many things, but employee activism no longer appears to be one of them.

On the podcast this week: Kevin and I puzzle through the implications of OpenAI's flirty new assistant. Then, I report back from my trip to Google I/O. And finally, we play a round of HatGPT.

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