Tech workers from the Cambridge offices of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, MIT and more will walk out on Friday as part of a global strike to fight climate change.
As of Tuesday afternoon, at least 50 employees planned to leave their respective offices Friday morning and join activists in Boston City Hall Plaza for a rally starting at 11:30 a.m., according to several sources who spoke to BostInno on the condition of anonymity. Led by a coalition of youth-led organizations and adult allies, Friday is an intergenerational day of striking designed to push leaders to take action on climate change—for many, today's most pressing issue and one that politicians and corporate leaders have been slow to recognize, let alone act on.
Among the most prominent tech workers organizing to fight climate change is the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, which last week announced it was joining the strike and made three demands of Amazon, including to establish a goal of going zero-emissions by 2030 by piloting electric vehicles in places significantly impacted by pollution.
More than 1,400 Amazon employees across all its offices have pledged to walk out so far. That includes workers at Amazon Cambridge, according to a source with knowledge of the walkout, but it’s not yet clear how many.
Workers from Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Google and others will also walk out, according to a Medium post published by the group Google Workers for Action on Climate (GWAC). Many of them are organizing with the Tech Workers Coalition (TWC), an activist group of employees at tech companies—from software engineers to line cooks, with chapters in several U.S. cities—who are gathering under the hashtag #TechClimateStrike.
John, a software engineer who works at Google in Kendall Square and declined to disclose his last name publicly, is one of the people organizing Googlers (as the tech giant calls its employees) internally. At Google offices nationwide, GWAC has gathered more than 400 pledges from employees to walk out.
Unlike at Amazon, John’s walkout is not directly targeting Google, where at least a dozen employees at the Cambridge office will join the climate strike. Rather, it’s a way for him to show solidarity with the youth activists coordinating the fight against climate change—and a way to call out the ways the tech industry at large has contributed to a warming world.
“I think technology has some responsibility, some role to play,” John said. “I also worry that if there’s a technology solution for the problem of climate change, people will say, ‘Well, it has to be profitable. It has to be something that the free market can drive forward.’ But I think that's partly what’s gotten us into this mess.”
For John, the wake-up call came last October, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a dire report that came with a warning: "Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society." The report outlines a future of worsening food shortages, wildfires and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040. That’s well within John’s lifetime, but more concerningly, it will be when his now-11-year-old daughter reaches her mid-30s.
John is hardly alone in his fears.
Down the street at Microsoft New England, also in Kendall Square, at least a dozen employees are planning on joining the walkout as well, according to a source there who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The company’s human resources department has not expressed condemnation or support beyond encouraging employees to use a vacation day, the source said.
As it happens, Microsoft has a chief environmental officer, Lucas Joppa, whose job is to advance the company's commitment to sustainability through tech and policy initiatives. Joppa published a blog post on LinkedIn Monday saying “we wholly support our employees as they join people around the world in making their voices heard” and voicing general support for the climate strike while stopping short of encouraging Microsoft workers to participate.
“Microsoft will be open on the 20th, and I will be in the office,” he wrote. "Given that the responsibility of my job is to ensure that Microsoft is increasingly aligned with a 1.5°C future, I believe that is the best way to show solidarity with my colleagues in the climate change community across the world.”
Other local tech companies have expressed much clearer support for the strike, going so far as to endorse the participation of their employees. Jonathan, who works at a cleantech startup in Cambridge and declined to disclose his last name publicly, is one of those.
“There was an internal company announcement basically saying that employers were free to join the strike,” Jonathan said. “But in general, ‘strike’ is kind of a scary word for companies. Among folks in groups like TWC, we don't really expect a lot of enthusiastic support for this kind of tactic.”
That’s why, so far, many tech workers have not pledged to walk out. The last major action at Google was last November, when some 20,000 Googlers—including John and his colleagues in Kendall Square—walked out of their offices to protest the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment claims. But that walkout reportedly led to retaliation against organizers by Google itself.
Still, Boston-area tech workers have been experiencing a relatively high degree of labor activism lately. Most recently, in June, several hundred employees of online furniture retailer Wayfair walked out to protest the company’s contract to furnish migrant camps at the southern U.S. border. And over the last year, workers at Google, Amazon and other major tech firms have called on their companies to walk away from the Department of Defense’s now-notorious Project Maven and stop selling facial recognition software to law enforcement—all part of the #TechWontBuildIt movement.
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice seems to be following that same playbook. But for employees at other tech companies, it's clear that the tech industry—and the private sector more broadly—will not have all the solutions to a problem as complex, far-reaching and urgent as climate change.
For John, that makes it all the more imperative for tech workers to agitate.
“If there’s a solution to some of this stuff, a lot of it will probably come from new technology or innovation,” John said. “I worry, though, that that’s giving people a false sense of comfort. I feel like people think, ‘Well, when it gets really bad, somebody will invent something and fix it.’ But I know from the inside, from talking to top researchers and top engineers in the industry, that they don’t know exactly what to do. There isn’t any magic technology solution coming. There are some proposals—geoengineering, carbon sequestration, things like that. They’re not ready at all.”
