At least 100 Google employees are asking their employer for clearer workplace guidelines around cyberbullying and accepted speech after a number of lawsuits were filed against the company related to what workers write on internal company discussion channels.
The Silicon Valley Business Journal previously reported that about 50 employees had organized themselves in an internal movement to informally petition the Mountain View-based division of Alphabet on the issue. Over the weekend, Reuters reported that number has now doubled.
As the Business Journal explores in our latest cover story, "Silicon Valley companies are walking an HR tightrope," many of the region's biggest tech employers, while traditionally bastions for free speech are now grappling with how to maintain civility and a sense of safety in increasingly politicized workplaces.
“We’ve been taken under siege in a war we didn’t even know we’re in, a war we didn’t even want,” Google software engineer Matt Stone told Reuters. “We want it to stop.”
The policies employees say they are fighting for include stopping personal attacks on forums, punishment for employees who leak conversations, and a list of rights for accusers, defendants, and managers, according to Reuters. Employees are also seeking protection against false claims made to human resources and are asking for a moderator to track misconduct in internal discussion forums.
Internal discussions have grown increasingly volatile since the presidential elections last year and have leaked out to the public on several occasions.
Last summer, Google engineer James Damore was fired after he posted a 10-page memo to employee message boards suggesting, among other things, that women may be less well-suited for software engineering than men and criticizing Google's workforce diversity efforts. Damore is currently pursuing a class-action lawsuit against Google that claims the company discriminates against white, conservative men like himself.
In February, another employee — this time, Tim Chevalier, a left-leaning worker, filed a lawsuit against the company alleging the company did not protect him from hateful rhetoric that was leaked and used to troll gay and queer workers. He also alleges that Google doesn't have clear guidelines on what employees may or may not say on internal forums, and that, as a result, he was unexpectedly fired.
"They're (employees) saying, if this doesn't happen in six months, we're considering leaving Google because the conditions there are getting unworkable and the group of people aware of these concerns is growing," he told the Business Journal in an interview last month.
Google engineer Liz Fong-Jones told Reuters that employees fear physical retaliation when internal conversations are leaked to media, which sometimes include writers’ names. “My coworkers and I are having our right to a safe workplace being endangered."
Employees in the organized group have been working with the nonprofit Coworker.org since last fall. Co-founder Michelle Miller told the Business Journal that she has personally worked with 40 of the employees as well as a growing number of tech workers from various other Silicon Valley companies.
Her colleague Yana Calou, who is Coworker.org's engagement and training manager, has also been working with employees and has made several trips out to Mountain View from its New York base, she told us.
“What seems to be unique is both the simultaneous commitment to open and free communication, and then the lack of clarity around what that open communication means,” Miller said. “We started hearing more from people — during the fall — who were so alarmed by the harassment and the firings that they finally reached out to someone else who could try to help them solve this problem because it was clear wasn’t going to be solved inside (their companies).”
Google is unique because it sets the standard for other tech employers, she added.
“The question we’re hearing from (employees) is more around just getting some amount of clarity and transparency about the ways in which HR and the C-suites are actually engaging in these discussions around diversity and inclusion in politics and what those parameters are,” she said. "It's really hard for these employees because they do feel really committed to Google and they do feel like this is such a solvable problem."
