“But in recent years, people in tech have been using collective action to speak out. Although it’s only recently come into the public eye, community organising within companies is thriving, says Google site reliability engineer Liz Fong-Jones, speaking on her own behalf, rather than as a representative of her employer. “The thing that’s new is that workers are publicly speaking. Workers [in tech] have been organising to accomplish product changes in order to hold companies accountable to their mission for many, many years – dating back at least eight years.”
She says that the reason we’ve been hearing more about these workers’ protests lately – as in the case of Project Maven and Microsoft’s ICE contracts – is because, “when you have governmental interests that are on the other side of an issue, it’s a lot harder to accomplish that change within a company because management wind up being stuck between a rock and a hard place.”