On Nov. 1, 20,000 Google employees and contractors walked out of the company’s offices around the world, one week after the New York Times reported that Google had protected three executives accused of sexual misconduct, including Android founder Andy Rubin.
But the protests were about more than just how Google handles harassment. On the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher,
six of the walkout organizers — Erica Anderson, Claire Stapleton,
Meredith Whittaker, Stephanie Parker, Cecilia O’Neil-Hart and Amr Gaber —
explained that employees’ grievances included a history of pay
discrimination, systemic racism and the unequal treatment of contract
workers.And Google executives have neglected to even talk about
some of the five demands that the workers presented in conjunction with
the walkouts.“They did not ever address, acknowledge, the list of
demands, nor did they adequately provide solutions to all the five,”
said Stapleton, a marketing manager at YouTube who has been at Google
for more than 11 years. “They did drop forced arbitration, but for sexual harassment only,
not discrimination, which was a key omission. Nothing was addressed
regarding TVCs [contract workers] … I think we didn’t see
accountability in action.”“You don’t have 20,000 people in the streets planned in
three days if there isn’t something deeply, structurally wrong,” added
Whittaker, the founder of Google’s Open Research group.Parker, a policy specialist at YouTube, initially read a
prepared statement to her San Bruno, Calif., colleagues during the
walkout, but then asked them a question she hadn’t written down. Where,
she asked, did Google get the tens of millions of dollars it paid to
Rubin and other senior executives accused of sexual misconduct?“They got it from every time you worked late,” Parker
said. “Every promotion you didn’t get because they said there’s not
enough budget, you have to wait. It’s from every contractor who came to
work sick because they have no paid time off. These are conscious
decisions that the company is making, and abusers are getting rich off
of our hard work.”And the walkouts, the organizers agreed, have in some
cases turned strangers into allies. People who had been raising red
flags for years and felt they weren’t being heard suddenly realized that
they were not the only ones who thought Google wasn’t hearing what it
needed to hear.“We’re giving our feedback about what’s wrong through all
of the official channels,” Parker said. “We’re filling out the surveys
every year. We are talking back in TGIF [all hands meetings] and asking
these questions, and nothing is happening. But once we begin to find
each other, and see each other all speaking out and all saying,
fundamentally, the same thing, then the fear starts to go away. Once we
start taking collective action, then we can’t be stopped.”
After 20,000 workers walked out, Google said it got the message. The workers disagree.
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