By B. Sivaraman
“Dear
Jeff,
“We are troubled by the recent
report from the American Civil Liberties union (ACLU) exposing our company’s practice of selling Amazon Web Service
(AWS) Rekognition, a powerful facial
recognition technology, to police departments and government agencies. …This will be another powerful
tool for the surveillance state, and ultimately
serve to harm the most
marginalized. …
“Along with much of the world we
watched in horror recently as U.S. authorities tore children away from their parents. … In the face of this
immoral U.S. policy, and the U.S.’s
increasingly inhumane treatment of refugees and immigrants beyond this specific policy, we are deeply
concerned that Amazon is implicated, providing infrastructure
and services that enable Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of homeland Security
(DHS). …”
Thus begins a letter written by
Amazon employees on 21 June 2018 and it goes on to demand of their CEO Jeff
Bezos that the company should scrap the contract with American law enforcement
agencies. Establishing a common grid for all the intelligence agencies of a
state equipped with massive biometric data of citizens and facial recognition
technology is the new normal. Amazon was to establish a common data centre for
17 American intelligence agencies at a cost of $600 million and extend face
recognition technology to them. But Amazon workers put their foot down in the
letter saying, “We refuse to build the platform that powers ICE, and we refuse
to contribute to tools that violate human rights”.
Amazon is not alone in collaborating
with the repressive state machine. Google and Facebook are assisting the US
government to suppress political opposition to its policies. Since April 2017,
both have announced measures in the name of fighting “fake news,” aimed at
reducing access to socialist, left-wing and anti-war publications.
Google entered into a contract with
Pentagon to provide artificial intelligence back-up to its drone warfare. On 4
April 2018, four thousand workers wrote to Google CEO Sundar Pichai against it,
and a dozen employees resigned in protest and the rattled Google backed off and
scrapped the deal. The collaboration between the tech giant and Pentagon marked
a qualitative leap in the seemingly all-powerful military-industrial complex.
But the tech workers’ might prevailed. That 4,000 tech workers revolted in
league with 400 academics, who also sent a protest letter, showed a different
order of anti-capitalist and anti-militarist united front.
On 17 August 2018, 1400 Google
employees shot off another letter protesting against the company succumbing to
the authoritarian Chinese regime’s pressure to have a censored search engine
for China: a powerful values-before-profit gesture that is in sharp contrast to
the corporate culture of genuflection. More than that one of their four demands
was that they should have a say in deciding about the ethical permissibility of
projects. That was a splendid display of workers’ power.
Google is not the only tech giant at
the service of the military. Edward Snowden revealed that Verizon, AT&T and
other Internet majors were also doing work for US National Security Agency
(NSA) on a programme of global and domestic surveillance. It is not that a
small fraction of tech workers are becoming vocal and their main mode of
protest is letter-writing. Tech workers have started organising on their
industrial issues too. They oppose labour abuse in other firms too and
solidarity actions are on the rise. A Tech Workers’ Coalition too has emerged
and they mounted vigorous solidarity action in support of workers of logistics
technology firm Lanetix, fired for attempting to unionise. Labour abuses in
tech sector can no longer go unchallenged.
Close on the heels of their
colleagues in other tech majors, on 19 June 2018, Microsoft workers too called
on their management to cancel the contract with the US Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) due to their excesses against immigrants.
In their protest letter they wrote:
“We are part of a growing movement, comprising many across the industry who
recognize the grave responsibility that those creating powerful technology have
to ensure what they build is used for good, and not for harm.” It was not just a
humanitarian gesture towards the poor migrants. Rather, it was a rebellion
against alienation of their work against their own civilized essence and core
values and turning the products of their work into a monstrous anti-human
device.
Global marches of Google employees
against the company’s attitude toward sexual harassment are well known. But not
many noticed protests by Facebook workers against the proximity of their
Vice-President Joel Kaplan with Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s handpicked nominee for
the Supreme Court facing sexual harassment allegations. Even less noticed was
the fact that many Facebook employees quit and accused the company of acting as
a parastatal surveillance outfit.
Amazonians too concluded their
letter with decisive lines:
“Our company should not be in the
surveillance business; we should not be in the policing business; we should not
be in the business of supporting those who monitor and oppress marginalized
populations”.
The tech workers were also asserting
that they had a right to know whether the work they were doing was ethical or
not and affirmed their right to say a loud ‘No’ to unethical work: “Implement
strong transparency and accountability measures, that include enumerating which
law enforcement agencies and companies supporting law enforcement agencies are
using Amazon services, and how”.
Such protests might be few in
number. But they are not isolated chance events. Rather, they point to a
blossoming of a new common consciousness across industries with very strong
underlying democratic values. Many are surprised at thousands of workers doing
what a handful of activists used to do earlier; say, on issues of immigrants or
militarisation. Even more intriguing for them is the reality of a very high
political consciousness blossoming among the advanced tech workers without an
external political agency infusing it from outside. Perhaps, an appropriate
political forum could well help in deepening it and in steering it towards
larger political goals. But a spontaneous political agency of the tech
vanguards is a new element in labour history. (IPA Service)
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