Name: Inside Google's Civil War
Uploaded: 2019-05-16
Duration: 9 min 43 s
Description: Employees are pushing back against the company's handling of sexual harassment claims and the secretive Dragonfly and Project Maven.

Thousands of employees walked out of Google offices in more than 40 locations around the world today, protesting the company's handling of sexual misconduct claims. Nearly 17, 000 workers and at least 40 offices all over the world protested yesterday. A protest of a walkout the job is the [ INAUDIBLE ] sexual misconduct allegations against the executives of Google. New York times investigations last week showed how Google paid million of dollars and exit packages to Andy Rubin and other male executives accused of misconduct We demand structural change in the name of transparency, accountability, health, equity. So Beth, let's talk a little bit about what's happening at Google right now. So Google is going through a really interesting cultural moment. There is an unprecedented level of workplace activism happening there. So you're seeing Employees who are pretty senior but not for a very long time are starting to question management business decisions in a really public way. So Google has always had that culture of debate, but it's kind of been internal and now I think it has really busting into the public. And how is management responding? So I think management is trying to walk a fine line here. So, a couple things that we've seen which the most public of which was the Google walkout which happened in November. 20, 000 Google employees all over the globe took to the street to protest the company's handling of sexual harrassment. And that's a lot of people, I mean Google has a 100, 000 employees, full timers, and 20, 000 of them took to the street. That's a lot of people to organize. It's a lot of people and I think, this may have been the first time that the public were seeing this but for months there had been lots of different issues brewing Inside the company, so you had this sexual harassment payout, $ 90 million to Andy Rubin. That was sort of the spark for the walkout. You'd also had this business decisions like Google had made kind of in secret. Two other projects had come up again and again. And this story are project marvin and dragon fly. Can you walk us through what both of those are? Sure. So Dragonfly is a search engine project that Google was working on for China and it was basically censored search and Google had pulled out of China in 2010 its search engine. Basically for human rights reasons. And so when employees found out that the company was working on a censored search engine again for China, I think that was one of the reasons that they were particularly [ SOUND ] upset. Project Maven is a contract with the Pentagon. By which the Pentagon was using Google's AI to look at drone footage and scan drone footage and employees were really concerned that that would that technology that Google technology could be used down the chain to To make drone strikes more lethal. So again really did not want Google engaged in any sorts of warfare activity. Employees were saying this is not okay and we're doing it very vocally. And so management I think is really trying to figure out how can we keep the culture we've had Of Derby alive as we are now 100000 employee company. Where do you think, I mean we've talked about this being fast moving and it's nowhere near resolved at Google. Where do you think the company goes from here? That's a really good question. I mean, I have asked them that, I should say that Google has known I've been working on this story since the beginning. I've talked to a couple of people that they sort of put forward for me to talk to. It's particularly in the culture side. They're pretty honest that this is something that they're working on right now, that they don't have all the answers, that they're not sure. How to handle all this. And I think they are trying to talk to employees. They do lots of in surveys. They're very data driven. Yeah. So they're actually trying to take the real- time picture of how employees feel. I think they don't know. Yeah, and how do you fix something that's so amorphous in some ways. It's a much more subtle and difficult thing to fix then, this product isn't doing what it's supposed to do. So I think it's a half of the company and that's that. I've seen friends get hurt and have their careers get distroyed because of this. Not just at Google, but anywhere including Clickit. All forms of tech companies. I think it's the first time is really important for tech companies. We've always been vandguard company. So if we don't Nobody else will. So, how do you approach a story like this? Where what you really need is voices from inside the company that can talk to you about what they're doing and what they're seeing and I mean, we certainly know that's not an easy easy thing .>> Yeah, I spent a lot of time talking to people. I think that was it was really it was not a story where you could just call someone have a 15 minute conversation and that was it. I talked to people multiple times really lengthy. No multiple our conversations. I met with a lot of people in person which I think really helps. And I'm not a tech reporter, and so I think I did have to build that trust. But I also think that coming from outside the tech industry gave me a perspective that was helpful. Mm- hm You actually told me something that sticks out for me which is that in all your years of reporting, you have never worked on a story where so many current employees of the company would talk to you. And obviously once people have left a company, a lot of times that frees them up. They feel like now they can say the things the never felt like they could say as employees. So what do think that's about? Why do you think people that are currently employed at Google were wanting to put themselves out there? So I found employees at Google were extremely well educated about their rights as employees. I've never had anyone say to me, protected concerted activity, to me so many times, as I have during this story. Is that like an labor organizing phrase? [ CROSSTALK ] Yeah. They were talking about their working conditions. Mm- hm. And that's protected activity. Yeah. And so a lot of people would talk to me about culture and and workplace problems, but would not talk to me at all about the business. Mm- hm. And they did draw a pretty strict lines. And that is this idea that you know, using this these phrases that have been used in sort of like labor law and labor, organizing. We haven't seen much of that in the tech industry, and that seems like a big part of the story, sort of a mental shift. That some of the workers at Google, and maybe more broadly, in the industry are starting to think of themselves more as sort of that traditional idea of labor. Does that seem, right? Yeah, yeah, I I didn't come up with this phrase. I don't want to take credit for it. But people often say this is tech workers are realizing their workers. And I think that they know that they have some privilege that other workers don't and they're trying to use that. But they have grievances like everybody else. They are using these traditional Methods of organizing, but what they're really asking for feels, I really think that's new. So I'm curious how you think, your story's about Google, and the particularities of Google, and why this maybe could only be happening in the way it is happening at that company. But What do you see as sort of the larger takeaways of this story? So I do think it's a story about scale, and how you scale culture and the challenges that come with that. And I do think there, I think that the rest of the tech world is watching Right we are seeing this now and Amazon for example was not a place where you were really publically criticizing the company and that's changing and I think employees are taking a little bit of a que for Google. Why did you think it was an important story to cover, what do you hope it will accomplish? So I think that one thing that we really try to do is take a step back and look at the bigger picture. And so there's been so much incremental news out of Google. I think we're really trying to look at, what does this mean for this company at large? What does this say about Silicon Valley and tech? And also what does it say about the changing relationship Between workers and their employers. Silicon Valley is always on the edge and I think because we're seeing this here first, we're gonna see it elsewhere too. So I think this story has lessons that go far beyond Google too. Yeah, I think that's right. [ MUSIC ] [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Inside Google's Civil War

Tech

Employees are pushing back against the company's handling of sexual harassment claims and the secretive Dragonfly and Project Maven.