Last June, Google engineer Irene Knapp made waves by presenting a stockholder proposal during the company’s shareholder meeting and delivering a scathing rebuke of its diversity efforts. When Alphabet’s 2019 meeting takes place on Wednesday, Knapp plans to speak out yet again, but this time around, two other employees will present proposals too..................................................................
..........................................................................................................................
That swell in participation, as well as planned demonstrations outside the event, illustrate how tech workers are increasingly taking a leading role in protesting company policies and business practices. The range of shareholder proposals — a record 13 for Alphabet — also demonstrate increased shareholder scrutiny in areas that employees have been vocal about, like sexual harassment, workplace diversity issues, and human rights.
Knapp will once again be speaking on behalf of Zevin Asset Management, an investment firm calling for Alphabet’s executive compensation to be tied to gender, racial and ethnic diversity metrics in employee recruiting and retention.
“Last year I presented with the hope of inspiring others to also speak out about topics of concern to them,” Knapp tells Forbes. “Today, there’s a very broad movement, both inside Google and throughout the tech industry, to organize.”
Since last June, Google workers have successfully pushed for changes to the company’s arbitration policy and contract worker agreements, and halted efforts for censored search in China and a flawed artificial intelligence ethics council. Employees from the likes of Microsoft and Salesforce have spoken against their companies working with the immigration enforecement agency ICE, and Amazon’s own annual meeting in May included a worker-led call for the company to reduce its environmental impact.
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
Alphabet employees are publicly aligning themselves with four other proposals aside from Zevin’s: One to ban forced non-disclosure agreements in all harassment and discrimination cases, one to rescind executive compensation in the event of misconduct, one to put an non-executive employee on the board, and one to publish a human rights impact assessment about Google’s plans in China.
The company formally recommends voting against all 13 of the shareholder proposals, making them extremely unlikely to pass thanks to the company’s multi-class share structure that gives Google’s cofounders 51% voting power.
NorthStar Asset Management has filed a proposal for the last four years that recommends
switching to a system with equal voting rights for shareholders. Although the resolution will likely fail again this year, a firm representative says that it's seen non-insider voter support rise to nearly 90%.
Another governance-related proposal came from CtW Investment Group, which submitted the resolution about having a non-executive employee on the board of directors.
In the United States, corporate boards don’t typically don't include rank-and-file workers but in parts of Europe, worker representation on boards is either encouraged or even legally required.
CtW executive director Dieter Waizenegger tells Forbes that he doesn’t think that Alphabet’s board has been proactive enough in responding to employee concerns like those raised by last November’s massive walkout.
“Adding a non-executive employee representative will help restore employee confidence in senior leadership and help resolve the cultural crisis by adding much needed depth to the its perspective,” he said. “We think it would help shake up a board that is not very diverse and very much controlled by insiders.”
Similarly, Knapp says that increasing diversity throughout the company — and the tech industry at large, which is still predominantly controlled by white males — could have ripple effects.
As academics and lawmakers grapple with the widespread societal effects that the big tech platforms have had, from fostering extremism to normalizing digital surveillance,
there's a sense that the industry needs to get better at predicting potential side-effects of their actions......................................
"Even with the best of intentions, the decision making by a homogeneous set of people cannot adequately represent the needs of the public," Knapp says.
The meeting will start at 9 am PST on Wednesday and will be livestreamed here.
Google did not respond to a request for comment about its employees aligning with outside investor proposals.