Jeff Bezos is wrong, tech workers are not bullies

By Laura Nolan

Tech titans like having their own way. Recently Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, declared that he would not let his workers bully the company into refusing some US military contracts.
He was  explicitly criticising my former employer Google, which decided last month  not to bid for a $10bn Department of Defense computing contract because it conflicted with ethical guidelines it adopted after employee protests over earlier military work. “If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble,” he said.
Fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg has also lashed out, saying that Google “bowed to pressure” when it decided to discontinue Project Maven, an effort to automate drone surveillance for the DoD, calling the decision “a defeat for US national security [and] patriotism”.
Messrs Bezos and Bloomberg paint Amazon and Google as victims, pushed around by powerful employees who do not care about patriotism.
This is absurd. Google and Amazon, and the DoD for that matter, are some of the most dominant institutions the world has known. Mr Bezos recently became the richest man in modern history. Mr Bloomberg is not far behind on the list of the world’s wealthiest.
Demanding that such power be held to account is common sense.
Rank-and-file tech employees, by contrast, do not have the same leverage. Ordinary Amazon employees — the median annual salary is less than Mr Bezos earns in 10 seconds — have been aggressively discouraged from unionising. Microsoft fired a team of contract engineers after they voted to unionise and as yet there is no tech worker union.
I believe Silicon Valley leaders have historically put profit ahead of employee livelihood and whatever perks these companies provide come at the discretion of bosses, and are less a reflection of individual merit than of employer convenience.
It is significant, then, that over the past year we’ve seen a groundswell of worker dissent as thousands of employees at Google, Microsoft, Amazon and elsewhere have pushed back against projects and  personnel decisions they consider unethical.
I am part of this growing tech workers’ movement. We believe we have a duty to resist the oppressive and unethical application of the powerful technology we build, and a right to know how our work is used.

We also believe that the public should have the same right. These technologies affect everyone. Decisions to build a  search engine that might be subject to Chinese surveillance and censorship, to automate warfare or to equip immigration authorities with facial recognition systems should not happen in secret — they should be exposed to sunlight and deliberation.
Such weighty choices need to be subject to democratic processes and robust public accountability. And such accountability needs to reach beyond national boundaries, given the massive scale and global reach of these companies and the technology they build.
I decided to leave my job as a staff engineer at Google because of Project Maven, and because I believe that the artificial intelligence ethical guidelines they published afterwards were not strict enough: they allowed surveillance within “internationally accepted norms”.
I am now joining forces with current and former Google employees who also opposed Maven and the Dragonfly search engine. We do not wish to be complicit in human rights violations and we believe that workers, and the public, deserve a voice. We support employees at Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, McKinsey and Deloitte who have similarly stood up to their employers.
We also have a right to not contribute to killing. Most workers at Google or Amazon did not join those companies to work on military applications. Both companies are international employers with engineering offices across the world, and many of their workers are neither US citizens nor residents. I worked as an engineer in Google's European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. To me, the US military is not our military (as Google Cloud chief executive Diane Greene referred to it in a blog post), nor is it a force we should automatically support as a matter of patriotism.
As an engineer, I believe it is my responsibility to speak up for human rights and accountable decision making. As an industry, we in technology cannot compromise our principles or allow ourselves to be bullied by billionaires who stand to be enriched by our silence.
The writer recently left Google. She is joined in these views by current Google employees Amr Gaber, Irene Knapp, Liz Fong-Jones, Tariq Yusuf, Burcin Erocal, two current employees who asked to remain anonymous and Jack Poulson, who formerly worked there