“Liz Fong-Jones, a former Google engineer who was involved in labor issues at the company but left in recent weeks, said in an interview that she supports the proposal.

“Management is not doing a good enough job of listening to employees,” she said, calling the company’s response to employees’ request for a board representative after the walkout “completely inadequate.” “I think it definitely is a perspective that’s not currently heard at the table, and I think that’s pretty powerful.””

““I think the thing that was most painful for me as someone who tried to work within the system for the past nine years is that the person who brought the Dragonfly project to light went to the press first because they didn’t feel safe whistleblowing internally,” Fong-Jones said.

”And I think that marks a really dark turn for the company. If people don’t feel safe to voice their concerns internally and provide that early feedback, then it results in a lot worse of a public backlash than if we address things early.”

Even still, Fong-Jones says she doesn’t discourage people from joining Google, even those in marginalized groups. But she believes they should enter that culture with their eyes open.”

““Employees at Google have been fairly vocal about making sure that the company upholds its pledge to not be evil,” Liz Fong-Jones, an engineer on Google’s Cloud Platform, told Fast Company last year. In 2016, she was among 2,800 tech workers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other companies who signed a pledge not to work on software that assisted discriminatory policies like President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban.”

“A Google employee who recently submitted her resignation from the company, Liz Fong-Jones, tells the crowd about organizing thousands of employees within the company’s rank and file. Along with Whittaker and others, she successfully helped wage a campaign to get Google to drop its contract with the Pentagon, which wanted to use the company’s AI technology for military drone strikes.

The success of these recent actions relied on a body of politically mobilized workers who leaked details of the plans to the press, signed petitions, and even resigned in protest rather than work on the project.”

“In recent weeks, pressure on Google has continued to mount. On January 3, prominent Google engineer Liz Fong-Jones announced she would be resigning from the internet giant after 11 years. Fong-Jones was a vocal critic of Dragonfly and other controversial Google initiatives, such as Project Maven, the company’s contract to develop artificial intelligence for U.S. military drones. She said she had decided that she could no longer work for Google because she was dissatisfied with its direction and “lack of accountability and oversight.””

“Liz Fong-Jones, a longtime Google engineer known for speaking out on a wide range of employee concerns, is leaving the tech giant to work at a startup.

Why it matters: Fong-Jones was early to challenge her employer on a range of issues from sexual harassment to its work on controversial projects.

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What’s next: Fong-Jones tells Axios that she is headed to be the first developer advocate at Honeycomb.io, a startup that aims to make distributed systems understandable by engineers.

She says what draws her to the company, in addition to the match with her expertise, is the leadership roles held by women and its commitment to diversity and corporate ethics.
As for Google, Fong-Jones says she stayed at her former employer because she cared about the company’s mission and felt it was her duty as an employee and technologist to speak up when she thought the company was heading down a wrong path.

”If I didn’t care about Google I probably would have silently quit many, many months or years ago.”
— Liz Fong-Jones
She said that activism can be hard to sustain and she didn’t see a way to remain at Google without burning out.

But she is glad others remain to push the company in good directions: “People staying behind who continue to work on these issues should be applauded.””

“Fong-Jones promised that if employees together pledged $100,000 for a strike fund to help support workers while picketing, she would match it with $100,000 of her own. Within about three hours, Googlers met her challenge, and the fund currently sits at about $250,000.
“I’m aiming to raise money for the strike fund,” Fong-Jones tells me, “so that people feel empowered to speak up about issues in the future, whether they be security and privacy-related or workplace conditions-related.” Though currently on sabbatical, the engineer is still very engaged in Google matters–with a prolific activist Twitter feed that often makes news headlines (and has 14,000 followers).”

“In the wake of the Intercept’s report, Google engineer Liz Fong-Jones called for a mass walkout should the project be greenlit without oversight by Google’s privacy and security teams. Offering to match $100,000 for potential strike or mass resignation funds, Fong-Jones raised more than $200,000 in a matter of hours.”

“On Thursday, Google engineer Liz Fong-Jones encouraged her colleagues to donate money to a fund to support employees who decide to quit or go on strike in protest of Dragonfly. The fund drew $115,000 from 19 current employees and two former ones, Fong-Jones told the Verge. She’s donating an additional $100,000, and has herself threatened to quit on Feb. 1, a move she said would forfeit half a million dollars in stock options for her.”

“The considerations, she wrote, should include “thinking about what a strike fund would look like and what a mass resignation mutual support fund would look like, especially to provide cover to folks on H1B visas.” She offered to match the first $100,000 raised, and in only a few hours, she said $100,000 had been pledged. She noted to The Verge soon after that $115,000 had been pledged from 19 current employees and two former ones.

“Okay, the full $100k has been raised,” Fong-Jones wrote in a tweet. “Watch this space for more details once I’ve spoken to legal counsel and more experienced labor organizers.””

“Fong-Jones, who created the fund, said the $125,000 came from a pool of 21 current and two former Google employees. She said in a message that she would also donate $100,000 to the effort.

Engineers involved in the strike fund are pursuing legal advice for dispensing the funds should employees on strike face retribution from the company.”

“But current and former Googlers have been riled by the revelations in Gallagher’s report. Brandon Downey, who worked on projects related to Google’s 2006 move into China, called Thursday’s “the most jaw dropping of the Dragonfly stories.” The report suggests Google CEO Sundar Pichai lied to the public and to employees, Downey said. (Pichai has repeatedly characterized the project as exploratory.)

Meanwhile Liz Fong-Jones, a vocal internal critic who has pledged to quit Google in February if the company does not make significant policy changes, may be organizing a strike. In a Twitter thread, she asked fellow coworkers to put money into a strike fund that would help cover employees’ expenses during an extended walkout. Within hours, employees had raised $100,000.”

“Engineer Liz Fong-Jones used her Twitter account to advocate for a strike if Google’s management team is seen to be pressuring the company’s security and privacy teams to sign off on DragonFly.

”If they aren’t allowed to do their jobs, that is another signal that clearly indicates resigning on Feb 1 is the right move for me,” she wrote before offering to match a $100,000 “potential strike or mass resignation funds.”

She then updated her account as internal employees pledged money to such a fund: “$20k already pledged… $30k… $50k… $70.5k…” Within three hours, Fong-Jones said she had raised the $100,000.”

“Fong Jones notes that pledges aren’t binding and that the next steps are to work with legal counsel and labor organizers to more formally set a fund up. But the fact that the idea has gained traction so quickly is another sign of the past year’s increasing wave of tech resistance, where workers have publicly protested about multiple workplace issues, including diversity, harassment, and controversial company business contracts.”

“Since February, more than 2,600 Google employees have signed a petition calling for the company to do more to curb harassment against employees and offer more transparency on how human resources staff conduct investigations.

Liz Fong-Jones, one of the organizers of the petition, said the new guidelines don’t go far enough in addressing their concerns.

“We don’t believe the new Code of Conduct adequately supports employees speaking out about the racism and sexism we face,” the organizers of the petition said in a statement.”