To have more influence over the governance of a corporation, the employees could push for a bicameral governance structure. E.g., have the board of investors elected directors with the president/CEO running the company, but also create a second board, a board of employee elected directors. The employee elected directors are elected by the employees of the corporation (1 employee = 1 vote). In order for a resolution (e.g., setting c-suite compensation or identifying types of clients the company will not cater to) to pass, both the board of investor elected directors and the board of employee elected directors must pass the resolution.
A benefit to the c-suite of this style may be that the employee elected directors can provide better feedback about the concerns of the workers before the workers start protesting and come up with solutions that are acceptable to both sides.
Climate change is the issue of our generation.
I agree that companies don't have a mechanism for dealing with it. Isn't that the point?
So...a union.
While I think it's good to demand change within organizations, the demand to eliminate all carbon emissions is unreasonable, and usually such demands are made by people in a comfortable position with no real skin in the game.
Nobody is saying that their only option is to quit, and nobody is going to say that.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18114285/google-employee...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-pentago...
Given that this lever obviously works, why shouldn't employees use it?
I agree with you that the current actions being taken aren't exercising the full power available to employees, but absent a real union it's incredibly difficult to organize strike action (a much superior course of action to threatening to quit).
You should not work at the company you are engaging in activism against. That isn't out of respect for the corporation in question, but rather for one's self. That's why the people who were truly against Google's unethical plans actually left the company. They didn't just sign some form online. They practiced what they preached. "Google shouldn't be helping the CIA murder people, and I shouldn't be working at Google."
How can one be their very best self if they are receiving relatively enormous paychecks working at a company with which they apparently fundamentally disagree on policies surrounding human rights?
How can one perform optimally at their place of employment when they are forced to cognitively take in the dissonance on a daily basis caused by the way their values clash with their employer's goals?
A "real union"? They don't need that, Google employees are making absurdly huge incomes at ridiculous starting salaries which are in no way representative of what multiple of productivity they offer the firm. They have decided their priorities supported working at an amorphous blob behemoth that cooked all their meals for them, walked their dog for them, and babysat their kids for them.
What this less-than-1%-minority in Google's employee needs to do is stop having their cake and eating it, too.
You might say - well, Google is not a democratic society. But the point is that it can be. So people who hold these two beliefs are perfectly justified to work at Google, and indeed that is the most effective route to their goal: of producing their best work in service of a just society.
Your prescribed solution is to abandon hope of change and retreat to... where? Where can one find refuge, exactly? Are we cursed to flee forever?
Agreed. It's safe protesting, aka virtue signaling. If you accept a paycheck from Google, you are inherently complicit in whatever course of action Google takes. It doesn't matter how much noise you make from the inside, until you are willing to walk out door, it's just talk.
IMO Google hasn't changed dramatically overnight. They have shown their hand in regards to ethical/moral lines for a long time.
I don't understand this argument. If you genuinely care about fixing the issue, then why in the world would you quit when you can instead stay and fight and have greater impact? Actively fighting from the inside of a powerful corporation that has real power to make changes is a much bigger lever you can pull than just quitting. These people are willing to risk their jobs to fight for what they believe in; how is it reasonable to accuse them of faux activism?
I'm not sure if you're making your arguments in good faith.
The demand is "no business with them", not "no oil supporting business with them".
If Big Oil (and they're all looking into how to survive in a "beyond petroleum" future, to adapt the slogan BP espoused for a while) wants to use the cloud to do material science modelling (to pick some arbitrary possible use of cloud resource that an energy carrier company could have) or use map data to determine suitable places to help them transition off oil into renewables, they should pay somebody else for that service?
(Disclosure: I work at Google, not in Cloud, haven't seen that letter, didn't sign that letter, don't have a car [or other direct dependency on oil] and am looking into renewables myself, although not at the level of doing material science)
Your baby entitles you to drive, thereby endangering and impoverishing everyone around you? Yeah you're right, there's an out-of-control sense of selfish entitlement in America.
The bit about the car (which might change soon, but that would be a small EV, so still not oil-bound), within the context of all the other disclosures, was mostly to say that I'm not "pro oil" in any way, even when I seem to argue against Googlers asking Google to choose its customers in a certain way.
That's usually the argument used when Americans say they need a car, because they lack public transport. For people living in say Copenhagen it's completely possible to have children and not own a car.
You know that you can take strollers on buses and trains, right?
In 2017, the American Communittmy Survey showed that of the 46m households with 3+ people, approximately 44 million had 1 vehicle and 16 million had 3 or more vehicles.
If you see two parents and a child in America, it's more likely one of them thinks the moon landing is a hoax than that they do not own a car.
Who lives in a bubble?
https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/17_5YR/B...
And those stats aren't suitable for this purpose (they're undercounting my millions more), as there are many one parent households, plus many parents who live in a household with others but who don't own cars themselves.
2 person households, 38 million with 1+ cars, 2 million without.
4+ person households are almost as likely to have 4 or more cars as 0 or 1 cars.
Single person households are almost as likely to have 2 or more cars as no car at all. (The dominant number of vehicles by far is, of course, 1.)
Of the 85 million households with more than one person, only 3 million have no cars at all. You can "undercount" and adjust all you want, you're talking 5%, maybe 7% maximum of "parents without cars."
Of course it's possible, in a few scattered geographic areas with high density and convenient public transit. But that's not almost any of America.
Personally I think all this manifestation of what "should" be political-sphere politics at work is a side effect of the complete brokenness of the politics sphere for having a substantive discussion about issues that might actually improve things. It's all been driven out by culture war and various sorts of loyalty-behaviour.
That and an acknowledgement of the huge amounts of power held by extremely valuable western companies. In some ways this is the logical conclusion of Citizen's United; if companies have a privileged voice (and running a media company is a huge megaphone!), then the best thing the public can do is attempt to wrest control of that voice. If they don't, it will be used against them on behalf of the CEO or a single wealthy owner.
Not to mention the political donations.
(Diffuse stockholders seem to have relatively little control over corporate voice as well.)
I suspect the actual reason you object to quitting is that it involves sacrifice. It's easy to sign a petition or hold up a billboard but it's hard to quit your job. The problem with this approach is that humans define virtue based on sacrifice. We are deeply suspicious of virtue that doesn't involve sacrifice and we should be because that kind of virtue is indistinguishable from self-aggrandizement.
If you really want to "question corporate power" then don't work for a coporation. Of course the reason people refuse to follow this advice isn't because "they want to change the corporations from the inside" -- it's because they want money and a lifestyle that comes from working for a coporation while also claiming the moral highground.
> Let's be clear here: humans banding together to accomplish goals greater than that which they are individually capable is a good thing. Now we just have to decide the governance model. Currently we have the unchallenged shareholder/executive system. Why not create a parallel power structure representing employees?
Why are you so sure that you are motivated by a desire to improve the world? I think the correct assumption is that you are deeply selfish and, mostly, what you want is to maintain and bolster your advantageous position. I think your perspective is adequately explained by that assumption.
Even if we assume that you want to improve the world, why are you so convinced that you know how?
There already exists a parallel power structure that represents all employees, suppliers, and customers. Its the structure of government.
I checked your profile for info to contact you privately to ask, but there wasn't anything, so my apology for the public request. Could you suggest any of Arendt's writings, especially around this subject? I've seen her referenced in interesting contexts and would love to read more.
I'd recommend a collection of three essays called Crises of the Republic. If you like that, then check out The Human Condition.
What should I do if I want to question all power? Become an hermit?
If you think people work at a corporation for money and lifestyle, then you are living in a bubble. I'm betting most people work at a huge company are doing menial labour and hate it.
Employees of claw hammer factories are better off not knowing what I do with their products in the dark of a Saturday night. Let's just say I'm not hammering nails.
OTOH, claw hammer factory workers are making a product that is legal to manufacture, legal to sell, and the intended use for said hammer is also entirely legal. You will find few protestors at the gates of the Stanley Corporation because of what folks might do with a hammer or a screwdriver. After all, they're really just trying to make tools for folks to build a nice dog house for your new puppy. And we all like puppies. Did Stanley just take on a big contract to supply the tooling for the construction of a new ICBM plant? Somebody got that contract, why didn't I hear about the protests?
To me, this just sounds like folks that are itchin' to protest something, and this is all they could find. Google's not making ICBMs here. If one feels strongly about the issue, do what I've done in the past and quit. ("You didn't tell me the DoD is your only customer.")
A quit can be individually done.
I can be in disagreement with both, so I'll rather be with just one, the value I provide to a company should be enough that my quit threat is good enough, otherwise, plenty of companies out there.
Googler's stock compensation is entirely in the non-voting class. Furthermore, most employees convert their google shares into cash or reinvest it in the broader market as it vests instead of just being long GOOG.
I feel like climate change and aggregating user data for ads are... not morally equivalent evils.
Climate change may be a bigger issue, but that doesn't mean the actions of Google's employees are going to be effective at dealing with that issue.
That's a subjective opinion. I happen to agree, but not everyone (even outside of Google) think their uses are morally questionable.
Prioritizing issues does not make you a hypocrite. Probably the opposite is more likely.
The deep question though is: should employees of a corporation have a say in its governance ?
Views from anyone in Germany would be interesting, as they seem to have a particular system for this. [2]
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4lkCECSBFw
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
I'll explain it to you: it's the only thing that works and the only thing that does not make you look like a big hypocrite.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18114285/google-employee...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-pentago...
This is just Google specifically, not all the other times which employees have successfully forced their employer to change course.
Lotta people will say "if you don't like it, quit" but I've never understood this. Running away isn't the only course of action available. So let's be clear: those who say this are making an "ought" statement (if you don't like what a company is doing, you ought to quit and let them do what they want) rather than an "is" statement (if you don't like what a company is doing, the only thing you can do is quit). Really illuminates the belief underlying this sentiment: corporate power is not to be questioned.