In March 2020, in response to the global pandemic, Google became the first major tech company to shift its workers to remote work mode and quickly announced that its employees would work from home until the summer of 2021. Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote, “I hope this will offer the flexibility you need to balance work with taking care of yourselves and your loved ones over the next 12 months.”1 The move was quickly followed by work-at-home announcements from the other Internet companies. This was in stark contrast to the millions of service workers who had to put their lives on the line and fight to demand a $5 per hour hazard pay increase.
Google is known for its search technology, but it has also been long associated with employee welfare, freedom, and engagement. The company has represented a new corporate culture and management that has supposedly reinvented labor management, revolutionized the power relations between labor and capital, and transcended the industrial mode of labor control. This chapter looks at Google's employee relations and how the company controls and manages its workers for its accumulation project.
In the era of the industrial economy, the distinct characteristic of labor management was the “scientific” approach—or “Taylorism,” after the works of Frederick Taylor—in which workers were tightly controlled and tasks were highly automated and mechanized based on time and motion studies, as their autonomy was stripped in order to attain maximum productivity.2 In conjunction with Taylorism, industrial capitalists in the Progressive era of the nineteenth-century also experimented with industrial paternalism, also called welfare capitalism or corporate welfarism as a mechanism for controlling labor by providing welfare programs such as pensions, education, healthcare, and housing. They were intended to increase productivity, curtail the tension between labor and capital, and undermine labor unions. These were the marks of managerial labor control techniques in the era of industrial capitalism.
Yet in contrast to Harry Braverman's thesis of the degradation of work, described in Chapter 3, post-industrial theorists in the 1970s whose ideologies later became the basis for the concept of the “new” economy in the 1990s argued that the new information-based economy had brought about the structural transformation of capitalism.3 Tayloristic and centralized labor controls were supposed to be no longer applicable because flexible organizations with workers having access to networked computer technologies undermined the logic of Taylorism.4 In the postindustrial era, it was claimed that skilled workers would be empowered to participate in decision-making processes as they enjoyed more autonomy and flexible working conditions, leaving behind the scientific management and bureaucratic control of the industrial era. At the same time, other scholars emphasized that instead of traditional coercive means of control, new managerial practices adopted corporate culture as a mechanism of social control. According to Gideon Kunda, whose work focuses on the tech industry, corporations adopted a culture of participation, autonomy, self-direction, pleasure of work, and technological solutions as ways for workers to be attached to their work and internalize corporate interests.5 The sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello observed this reorientation of the corporate value system, describing it as the “new spirit of capitalism”—an ideology that emerged between the 1960s and 1990s to justify and sell capitalism to the masses.6
Have the old industrial forms of labor management simply disappeared in the new economy? Are these really new managerial control techniques? And what about Google? The search company seemed to be an exception, showing the possibility of transforming capitalist labor relations by deploying new labor control systems to empower workers’ voices, encourage their participation and collaboration, and give them the freedom to explore. Google's economic success was often attributed to its seeming to move away from old ways of management by wholeheartedly embracing these empowering managerial techniques. This chapter, however, challenges the post-industrial theory and argues that Google's seemingly participatory and democratic approaches to labor management are firmly rooted in the historical tradition of industrial capitalist labor control.
The first part of this chapter describes the emergence of corporate welfare in the nineteenth century as forms of labor control within which Google's current labor management should be situated. The second part focuses on Google's specific labor control techniques—modes that facilitate the expansion of capital—and shed light on how work and workers are controlled within the longer history of labor management in capitalism. It shows that, behind the façade of ostensibly worker-oriented and participatory working conditions, Google deploys traditional tactics of scientific management and corporate welfare programs that are in sync with the seemingly bygone era of industrial capitalism.
Organic gardens, cafés and well-stocked kitchens, swimming pools, onsite doctors and masseuses, day care, free haircuts, around-the-clock fitness centers, yoga and meditation classes, Wi-Fi–enabled commuter shuttles with private guards, and Google bikes are all part and parcel of the extensive benefits of working at the Googleplex. More than three million square feet in area, the Googleplex occupies a suburban landscape within sunny, bucolic Silicon Valley. This hardly looks like a typical workplace. For several years running, Fortune has named Google the best place to work in the United States, and for many young professionals the company is perceived as the archetypal idealized workplace.
With “Passion not Perks” as its motivational tagline, Google is famous for its 20 percent time program, in which its employees are supposedly allowed to spend one day each week working on projects they are passionate about but are outside their primary job duties.7 The program has morphed over the years, and it's unclear how many Googlers actually use their 20 percent time.8 Yet it is one of the well-known “perks” of the company's “innovative” policy. Its competitors have followed in Google's footsteps. Facebook boasted about offering free meals, on-site health check-ups, dental care, haircuts, laundry service, an art studio, and more. Apple launched its own version of 20 percent time, allowing some employees to take two weeks to work on their own projects of interest.9 More recently, Google, Apple, and Facebook have even been offering to freeze the eggs of their female employees.10 While this chapter focuses on Google, many of the major tech companies in the Valley and other parts of the world have emulated Google's model as they all compete over a small segment of highly desirable workers.
In the Googleplex, it is claimed, employees seem to have autonomy and are able to pursue their curiosity and inspiration as an escape from the drudgery of work. Google management has embedded the maker or do-it-yourself ethos into the Googleplex to encourage technical experimentation and play for their own sake—and has presented it as an alternative to capitalist pursuits. The company has often been portrayed by media as an intellectual playground, a relaxed and informal workplace that fosters curiosity, creativity, and innovation. It has claimed a non-hierarchical, open organization and a bottom-up approach to management instead of a bureaucratic, hierarchically controlled structure; it has hyped employee participation, empowerment, and democratic decision making. Mission, transparency, and voice were ostensibly the main components of Google's corporate culture. The firm's success has often been attributed to this unique management style. Google has long been perceived in the press as reinventing, democratizing, and revolutionizing labor management as it represented an epochal shift in capitalist development.
Google's seemingly idyllic culture and exciting working environment are unthinkable for most workers today, who are barely clinging to their jobs and face grueling working conditions and radical reductions in, if not eradication of, basic employee benefits such as pensions, paid leave, and healthcare coverage.11 Google's showering of its workers with a host of perks, services, and amenities seems unfamiliar to many ordinary workers, and even anti-capitalistic. It could be seen as a unique feature of the new economy. However, US corporations deployed similar forms of welfare capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to control labor and alleviate labor conflicts driven by the expansion of industrial production. This, in turn, allowed them to avoid government intervention and curtail unionization.
The late nineteenth century was an era of upheaval in the American labor movement. The rapid expansion of industrialization and the emergence of big business with the introduction of large factory systems were accompanied by bitter and intense labor struggles. With the backdrop of the two economic depressions from 1873 to 1878 and 1893 to 1897, which led to widespread unemployment wage cuts and dire conditions for workers. Toward the end of the first depression, workers began staging a series of nationwide strikes and protests against capital's vicious oppression and brutal exploitation. In 1877 the first major nationwide strike, the Great Railroad Strike, broke out on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and quickly spread across the country. The 1886 Haymarket incident brought together in a peaceful labor demonstration tens of thousands of overworked and underpaid skilled and unskilled workers demanding “ten hours’ wages for eight hours’ work” and ended with seven anarchists sentenced to death.12 During the Homestead strike of 1892, steel workers fought a bloody battle against a mill owned by the Carnegie Steel Company, which tried to reduce wages and break the union.13 In 1894, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company factory in Chicago walked out after the company laid off a large number of employees and the American Railway Union (ARU), after failed wage negotiations, led a nationwide strike. Between 1880 and 1900 workers struck nearly 23,000 times, disrupting more than 117,000 companies.14 Workers fought against corporations via unionization, strikes, sabotage, picketing, high turnover, and absenteeism; they also faced the government, which often backed the companies and sent out the National Guard to break strikes. In response to labor upheaval and acts of resistance, employers attacked labor using a range of tactics including legal injunctions, anti-union open shops, private militias, industrial espionage, strike breakers, blacklisting of union organizers, and mechanization.
In the midst of this labor unrest, capital experimented with a new kind of labor management called welfare capitalism, or corporate provision of welfare programs rooted in industrial paternalism to ameliorate labor-capital relations.15 The practice emerged in the context of increasing unionization and labor resistance, the expanding role of government in industrial affairs, and workplace reforms during the Progressive era.16 Welfare capitalism was still designed to exert managerial power and enhance production and profit, as was Fredrick Taylor's scientific management theory, whose premise was that human activities could be controlled, measured, and mechanized. But wellfare capitalism emphasized social relations and “human elements” disregarded by Taylorism.17
At first, corporate welfare programs were piecemeal because not all industrial capitalists accepted the idea, given that it required heavy capital investment. The historian Daniel Nelson points out that welfare programs often were introduced in geographically remote companies or in industrial sectors such as textile mills where a large number of women were employed.18 They offered amenities like lunchrooms, social clubs, and organized social events. But there were differences in the way the sexes were treated. Female workers were not considered the main breadwinners and weren't expected to work long-term, so they were not offered pensions, savings programs, or insurance plans.19 Welfare capitalists inscribed traditional gender roles in private workplaces as factory owners cast themselves in a parental role to “protect” and “nurture” women workers to be good wives and mothers while being wage earners and “taking care” of their workers in exchange for hard work and loyalty.20
Welfare capitalism evolved over time, with specifics depending on the firm and its location, the nature of its business, and the composition of its workforce.21 In general, welfare programs became more common in large firms, which were more inclined to experiment with new labor management systems because they had financial backing, needed to manage a large and diverse workforce, wanted to improve their public image, and—most important—required a stable labor force for industrial production lines.22 Thus, such companies as National Cash Register, International Harvester, Standard Oil, H. J. Heinz, General Electric, Western Electric, AT&T, Pullman, US Steel, Procter & Gamble, Good Year Tire and Rubber, Eastman Kodak, and Endicott-Johnson were all early adopters and proponents of the welfare approach to the labor problem. Offerings varied by company, encompassing housing, medical services, educational and recreational facilities, gardens, swimming pools, sport teams, boys’ and girls’ clubs, libraries, educational benefits, cafeterias, stock options, profit-sharing plans, pensions, and sick leave.
Dayton, Ohio was the early twentieth century's equivalent to Silicon Valley, generating the most patents in the United States at that time.23 One Dayton company in particular, National Cash Register, was known for its expansive welfare programs starting in the late 1800s, established by the first corporate welfare department.24 The 1899 Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics survey on welfare capital firms showed a glimpse of National Cash Register's corporate programs.25 The company provided fresh aprons and sleevelets with free laundry services and equipped its workspace with luxurious restrooms and lounges furnished with pianos and couches.26 Fresh towels and soap were provided for free, with shower facilities in each men's bathroom.27 The company's hygiene department was staffed by a physician and nurses to provide medical aid. Its work floor was considered a model factory, surrounded by a 325-acre park and well-groomed lawn, with rooms that were well-lit and equipped with ventilation and heat.28 The company also offered classes in English for immigrants and music classes, sewing, cooking, and gardening classes, and financial benefits including profit-sharing and paid vacations. These welfare programs became the model for many other big US corporations including IBM and General Motors. Welfare capitalism went beyond the factory floor, as well. It was not only used to stave off unionization and buy workers’ loyalty but also was appropriated for public relations in order to appeal to and appease the public and the government.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as big corporations grew and accumulated enormous wealth and power by controlling markets, exploiting workers, and influencing government in the United States, reform-minded journalists—nicknamed “muckrakers”—and other social reformers began to expose to the public these companies’ monopolistic and illegal business practices, abusive treatment of workers, and abhorrent working conditions. Under this scrutiny, it was important for corporations to garner public support in order for them to retain workers, maintain their power, and deflect government regulations. Thus, companies sought PR strategies to create positive images by distributing company magazines lavishly covering their welfare work and sponsoring tours to bring influential academics to their plants.29 To assuage the public, many corporations extended their welfare programs by building urban parks, town centers, city gardens, and public recreational facilities and participated in neighborhood planning.
Welfare capitalism began to spread more widely in the early twentieth century as national organizations like the National Civic Federation and the League of Social Service promoted the programs.30 The National Civic Federation, in particular, which included corporations, conservative unions, social reformers, politicians, and academics, established a committee on welfare work in an attempt to systematize welfare programs across industrial sectors.31 Moreover, institutions of higher education including Bryn Mawr, Smith College, and Yale University began to offer courses on the subject such as “Industrial Service Work” and professionalized welfare work.32 By 1916, 150 schools offered similar classes related to welfare services.33 Welfare capitalism was also wrapped up in an Americanization effort intended to assimilate large numbers of immigrants into the US workforce. The Ford Motor Company was an exemplar that developed welfare programs as a way to manage the cheap foreign workers who mended its machines—71 percent of Ford's workers were immigrants, primarily Russians, Romanians, and Austro-Hungarians.34 The company had consistently suffered from a high workforce turnover rate; Ford's plant in Detroit had a rate of 370 percent in 1913, and sometimes workers simply walked off the job.35 This frequent turnover was costly to Ford. To stabilize and retain its workforce and increase productivity, the company experimented with internal welfare programs in an effort to solve the human elements, the “labor problem.” It extended control of labor processes beyond the factory floor by instituting programs such as savings options, healthcare, and profit-sharing.
One of Ford's most famous programs was the five-dollars-a-day plan, with a reduction of the working day from nine hours to eight, which shocked the world because it was double the average wage at that time, making Ford workers better paid than those in any other industry. But the five-dollar-a-day program wasn't company largesse; rather, it served two functions, both aimed at solving capital's immediate problems. Because mass production requires mass consumption, raising workers’ wages was a way to generate higher consumption of automobiles. The other function of the program was to discipline and control workers’ behavior so they would be docile on the shop floor and beyond.
Historian Stephen Meyer recounts that the five-dollars-a-day wage was not given to workers as fair pay; rather, it was used as a reward system to motivate them and intervene in their private lifestyles to ensure that they fit into the mechanized work environment for mass production.36 Employees had to change their behaviors and qualify to earn five dollars per day by meeting particular behavioral criteria established by the company.37 In order to tackle these tasks, Ford established a Sociological Department at its Highland Park facility in Detroit, where the company conducted investigations on workers, monitoring and detailing their private lives. By 1919 the department had hired hundreds of investigators who visited workers’ homes, talked to workers, and documented their spending habits, cleanliness, and sobriety, among other personal details.38 The Sociological Department used those data to determine eligibility for the five-dollars-a-day program. As Meyer observed, Ford extended its management beyond the shop floor to impact broader social and cultural values and behavior.39 Although Ford was an example of the times, it was not uncommon for welfare capital firms to use cultural and social values such as family, good morals, individual responsibility, and thrift to discipline their workers.
As capital extended its control to workers’ social and private lives and recognized the “human element,” there was increasing interest in applied social and behavioral science on the part of corporate America to understand the conditions under which workers could be more efficient and productive. In the highly influential experiments, conducted in the 1920s at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne plant in Cicero, Illinois, social science was applied to the factory floor and industrial relations to investigate the relationship between productivity and working conditions.
Western Electric was one of the leading companies to endorse welfare capitalism early on, and it refined its approach over time. Beginning in the early twentieth century, the company gradually extended its welfare programs: It offered a pension system, stock options, and a benefits package; opened a hospital and medical department; and established the Hawthorne Club as the center of workers’ social activities, with concerts, classes, sports competitions, a club store, and beauty contests.40 To administer and manage these various programs, Western Electric established a centralized personnel management department akin to today's human resource department. By formalizing a personnel management unit that dealt with discharge, promotion, and benefits, the company was able to exercise bureaucratic power over a large workforce. The emergence of personnel management was one of the essential features of welfare capitalism.41 Western Electric's Hawthorne plant was one of the sites of new systematic experimentation in human relations.
The company brought in Harvard University professor Elton Mayo and his research team, including Fritz Roethlisberger of Harvard Business School and Clair Turner of the Biology and Public Health Department at MIT, to conduct research on a team of six female relay assemblers under various working conditions over a period of time. Richard Gillespie relates that Mayo's research was funded by Western Electric, AT&T, Rockefeller Foundation grants, and the National Research Council.42 The research team ran numerous experiments with variables such as illumination, rest periods, working conditions, shift hours, and length of the workday and week to measure their relation to workers’ efficiency and productivity. Gillespie points out that the nature of the research was heavily paternalistic as the team also conducted interviews with female workers about their private lives and probed their physical conditions using their visits to the factory hospital to experiment on the relation between the women's personal lives and their productivity, as the researchers applied their backgrounds in psychology, sociology, and anthropology.43
According to Mayo's experiment, workers’ productivity increased with the improvement of the working environment, but productivity also continued to increase if special improvements in working conditions were removed. Their research claimed that employees’ attitudes toward work, their motivation, and their morale could be more important than their actual physical working conditions in increasing efficiency and productivity. This became known as the Hawthorne Effect, in which productivity, performance, and job satisfaction would be improved temporarily when workers felt as if they were valued and receiving attention, and that their employers cared about them.44 This research has been credited with the development of the industrial labor relations theory, but as Gillespie argues, this scientific knowledge was “discovered” and disseminated within a network of business elites including managers, executives, and social scientists and the particular context of institutional and ideological environments in which a school of labor management was developed.45 One of the legacies of the Hawthorne experiments was a scientific foundation for capital to move away from coercive management and unilateral paternalistic welfare capitalism and instead adopt “participatory” and “worker-centered” welfare capitalism through personnel management.
Welfare capitalism accelerated during World War I because the war effort required the maintenance of a stable and undisrupted workforce for wartime production. The government also established a Committee on Welfare Work of the Council of National Defense to pressure corporations to adopt welfare programs to ensure labor stability. During the war, workers seemed to make inroads toward exerting their power and improving their working conditions, but this did not last long. Once the war was over, many firms retracted wartime benefits at the very time when workers were struggling to retain their bargaining rights and pay for their basic needs amid postwar inflation. As the workers’ struggles intensified, corporations revived their welfare programs to undermine labor's organizing efforts and state welfare programs. Sean Dennis Cashman documented that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1919, 375 of 431 firms provided various types of medical services, 265 had a hospital, 75 had pension benefits, 80 offered disability benefits, and 152 were equipped with recreational facilities for their workers.46 In the 1920 survey, 50 percent of 1,500 of the largest US companies had established comprehensive welfare initiatives.47 This boost in welfare programs also stemmed from and was spurred by the 1917 Russian revolution, as capital feared the possibility of proletarian revolution in the United States.48
Along with beefing up welfare, capital also launched repressive open shop campaigns led by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) to weaken and break unions across the country. The association mobilized around the slogan of the “American Plan,” which claimed that unionization was un-American, and required workers to sign agreements that they would not join a union—the so-called yellow dog contract.49 The National Association of Manufacturers, along with the US Chamber of Commerce, sought to make the American Plan appealing to the public as they attacked labor. Corporate America deployed a mixture of tactics including both carrots and sticks to promote its interests, and unions began losing ground. The brutality and repression of industrialists against labor were well exposed later by the La Follette Committee's investigation of workers’ civil liberties from 1936 to 1939.50
The Great Depression of the 1930s brought about a resurgence of labor militancy along with the involvement of the federal government in backing welfare programs as part of New Deal reforms. Some historians argue that welfare capitalism disappeared because of the Depression,51 but Sanford Jacoby points out that it was simply reshaped in response to the labor movement and political and economic conditions.52
Facing the collapsing economy and pressure from labor insurgency, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal coalition embarked on economic relief programs and became involved in providing state welfare. Far from the radical structural reforms that workers were demanding, the New Deal established a foundation of state welfare programs that later interlocked with corporate welfare programs.53 Roosevelt's New Deal introduced a number of social policies including the Social Security Act of 1935, followed by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, also known as the Wagner Act, which gave workers the right to organize, made company unions illegal, promoted fair labor standards, and instituted unemployment compensation, public pensions for the elderly, and a federal minimum wage.
Under the Wagner Act, a range of workers’ benefits could now be negotiated via collective bargaining over wages, hours, and working conditions, and the government began to expand state-financed welfare programs. The act had provided a legal platform for the mobilization of workers and union drives by the newly formed Committee for Industrial Organization, which was actively organizing both semi- and unskilled workers, who increasingly replaced skilled craftsmen, under the slogan of “one big union” in industrial factories.
But American business aggressively lobbied to overturn the Wagner Act, and soon after World War II Congress passed the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act to modify the Wagner Act and restrict the power of organized labor, despite labor's mobilization against the Taft-Hartley Act. With Taft-Hartley, non-union companies expanded welfare capitalism as they tried to defeat the new union-organizing drives and compete for worker loyalty. Sanford Jacoby notes that such major firms as Eastman Kodak, Sears Roebuck, Procter & Gamble, DuPont, and IBM refashioned their welfare programs as they competed against unions for worker loyalty, promoting the mutual interests of capital and labor as an alternative to unionism.54 This new phase of welfare capitalism, supplemented by government welfare programs, was distinct from earlier versions as capital sought to establish a “kinder, gentler sort of paternalism” which emphasized consent rather than control.55 Although the labor movement grew more militant during the 1950s and 1960s, the private welfare system was sustained by US companies as a tactic to stifle unions. As Jacoby points out, welfare capitalism had to be reshaped between 1930 and 1960 to grapple with both industrial unionism and ascending state welfare programs. In the 1980s and 1990s, spurred by the decline of labor power, global competition, and political economic changes, welfare capitalism once again changed as US businesses deskilled, eliminated, and offshored jobs, demonstrating that “we care” was merely a public relations gimmick used to bolster the public image of the corporations rather than a real change in capital-labor relations.
With this as historical backdrop, the Internet industry exists within a largely union-free environment in the Valley,56 but it has revived welfare capitalism. Specifically, Google's renewal of welfare capitalism needs to be contextualized and resituated within the long history of corporate welfare as a form of labor control.
With growing competition and rapidly changing markets and technologies in the search engine industry, it is vital to have a steady stream of engineers and other professionals who may be tasked with immediate and strategically imperative work objectives. Boltanski and Chiapello describe this group of workers as “cadres”: young, educated technical experts of high social status “whose support for capitalism is particularly indispensable for running firms and creating profit.”57 They argue that these workers “aspire to share decision making power, to be more autonomous, to understand managerial policies, to be informed of the progress of business.”58 And for many of these cadres, a high salary is not a sufficient reason to work; the work is supposed be meaningful and contribute to the greater good.59 In the search engine industry, these cadres are a small segment of workers—including the software engineers, financial analysts, project managers, and related professionals described in the preceding chapter—many of them belonging to the group of workers possessing the mobility to climb the social ladder. In order to retain them for a certain period of time and ensure a continuing supply, Google sells the values of freedom, morality, and public goods as a labor management and accumulation strategy.
Describing itself as “organizing the world's information,” Google has long asserted that “you can make money without doing evil”60 and triumphantly presented its endeavor as a worthwhile alternative career opportunity. Its slick leaders, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, have public images that are far from tyrannical. They are portrayed more as freedom fighters who challenge and revolt against oppressive regimes such as China and Cuba (as defined by the US government). For young elites, working for such a search engine firm, whose main business is information access, this seems to offer an uncompromised opportunity in which working for capital and pursuing the public good are—for once—mutually and completely compatible. With the rhetorical façade of democracy, freedom of information, and human rights, Google has developed global common values that not only motivate and drive its employees but also extend outward to attract intellectuals, activists, and the public to sympathize with its enterprise. Initially, Google's logic was that when its employees internalized these values Google would have no need to use strict management techniques. As Richard Edwards points out, “The most sophisticated level of control grows out of incentives to workers to identify themselves with the enterprise, to be loyal, committed, and thus self-directed and self-controlled.”61
Unlike industrial factories that exploit every ounce of a worker's labor to increase profits, Google's management approach has often been praised for the utmost care shown for its employees as well as the common good. The company has long been known for taking care of its workplace and everything within its employees’ lives, from meals to laundry to death benefits that include paying the spouse or domestic partner of the deceased 50 percent of his or her salary for ten years. The question raised at this point is: If the nineteenth century's corporate welfare program was created to control labor, curtail labor unions and government intervention, and prevent proletariat revolution, then what is the motivation behind Google's renewing and expanding employee benefits when there are few labor unions and scarce threats of government intervention? Why do companies like Google spend so much money on employee benefits? Some might think that the exploitative nature of the capitalist system has given way and that in the new economy a benign capitalism is truly possible. Yet Google's management techniques illustrate that the new economy carries characteristics of a supposedly bygone era of welfare capitalism. Why? In response to what threat or compulsion? The answer lies in history.
A century ago, National Cash Register president John Patterson, in reference to his company's welfare program, explained, “It pays.”62 Similar practices have been paying off for Google. Its employees are 40 percent more productive than those in the average company.63 Laszlo Bock, Google's former vice president of People Operations, described it thus: “The important thing to note is that you don't need a lot of money to do what Google has done. If you give people freedom, they will amaze you.”64 Seemingly over-the-top lavish perks and freedom do not contradict capitalist logic; rather, they closely align with capital accumulation by bringing elites into the Google enterprise and are a successful way of hiring and managing a highly skilled workforce. Google's welfare capitalism is a strategy based on economic self-interest; it aims to secure the enthusiastic and intensive labor of the top engineers, programmers, and managers in the world—a scarce commodity easily lured away by the competition.
For instance, Google's mode of management is commonly exemplified by the company's provision of free gourmet food for its regular employees, which receives much positive press coverage. Corporate free food programs are not new; however, Google seems to have brought them to a different level by supplying executives as well as all employees with local, fresh, and organic meals cooked by top chefs and catering to the international tastes of its employees. Though it has often been portrayed as genuine exceptionalism on Google's part, the food program was part and parcel of the company's management strategy. A Google executive once stated that it was a way to increase productivity; employees would not have to leave their workplace for meals, which meant extending working hours.65 In 2014 Google spent $80 million per year for food, but even that was a net savings. Joe Labombarda, former executive chef at Google's Manhattan office, in an interview with ABC said that the purpose of the free food was to maximize productivity and loyalty.66 At the turn of the twentieth century, free lunch similarly embodied corporate paternalism; well-fed workers were more productive.67 Google's free food is not a perk, it is part of a productivity maintenance strategy. In 2011 Google chairman Eric Schmidt put his management technique bluntly:
The goal is to strip away everything that gets in our employees’ way…. We provide a standard package of fringe benefits, but on top of that are first-class dining facilities, gyms, laundry rooms, massage rooms, haircuts, car washes, dry cleaning, commuting buses—just about anything a hardworking employee might want. Let's face it: programmers want to program; they don't want to do their laundry. So, we make it easy for them to do both.68
He presented this idea as if the purpose of these generous benefits was truly to look after workers’ personal growth and interests, but by “strip[ping] away everything” else Google extends employees’ working hours by reducing any work interruptions and stoppages. In his 2008 interview with McKinsey & Company, Inc., a management consulting firm, Schmidt also revealed how the company managed productivity and intensity of work, stating:
You need two things. You have to have somebody who enforces a deadline. In a corporation the role of a leader is often not to force the outcome, but to force execution. Literally, by having a deadline. Either by having a real crisis or creating a crisis. And a good managerial strategy is “let's create a crisis this week to get everybody through this knot hole.”69
Under industrial capitalism, the speed and intensity of work were coded into new machinery that set the pace of work for working-class labor. Although Google does not use machinery in a nineteenth-century sense, it does resort to psychological manipulation—techniques of labor control stemming from the early twentieth century welfare firms.
Moreover, Google is now extending its hand over the very lives of its employees beyond its single workplace by appropriating and reshaping the environment and landscape itself. The company expanded its physical footprint, constructing its ambitious new Mountain View, California, corporate campus by adding a forty-two-acre section of NASA's Moffett Field (a former US naval air station) through a long-term lease from the federal government. In 2017 Google began to construct two office buildings totaling 1.1 million square feet for research and development. Its real estate chief, David Radcliffe, remarked that the goal was to make the company headquarters “nurturing and regenerative to the environment, provide a vibrant community and work/life balance for all.”70
The new campus, called the Bay View Complex, opened in 2022 with much fanfare. According to Google, it is designed on the principle of people-centered sustainability—natural light, renewable power, open space, and greenery—featuring two giant tent-like office buildings with solar panel roofs shaped like dragon scales, a thousand-seat event venue, and a short-term housing complex with two hundred rooms.71 More than seventeen of the forty-two acres of the Bay View campus are preserved natural areas with wetlands, marsh, trees, and wildlife habitat. Google employees have access to these natural places, which become part of the company's corporate management strategy: a “potential source of inspiration and education.”72 But unlike its proprietary search algorithm, the surrounding natural area is also open to the public, the perfect marriage of natural and sustainably built spaces right out of a utopian sci-fi movie. Such a sublime landscape helps conceal how Google's wealth is being generated and its reliance on exploitative hierarchical labor structures.
Google is also in the midst of seeking approvals from the city of Mountain View for massive company town plans: the Middlefield Park Master Plan and the North Bayshore Plan. Unveiled in 2020, Middlefield Park is a forty-acre project with multiple parks, retail stores, offices, and community space, as well as up to nineteen hundred residential units.73 The North Bayshore project, Mountain View's largest development proposal ever—slated to take thirty years to complete—develops 127 acres with seven thousand housing units, three million square feet of offices, and thirty-one acres of public parks.74 Google states that the projects are building on the principles of community, innovation, nature, and economics.75 Yet these principles camouflage the nature of capital and labor relations in capitalism: The company is reengineering built space where workers, capital, economic and social activities, and infrastructure can be brought together to create conditions for further expansion and capital accumulation.
Google's vision is far from unfamiliar: It replicates a modern-day company town on the model of Pullman, Illinois, Hershey, Pennsylvania, or McDonald, Ohio, along with a corporate culture where there are no boundaries between work and private life and employees will have no reason to leave Google's orbit. For this reason, under the premise of a “flexible and hybrid model” and “community,” the company does not need to deploy a traditional tightly controlled management mechanism to expand the boundary of work; rather, Google intends to reshape workers’ lifestyles and their physical environment in order to motivate them to voluntarily put in longer hours at the Googleplex, and inscribe its corporate value.
Google's worker-centered and democratic management strategies are typically equated with its overall approach, yet this is not the entire picture. On one level, Google embraces a care-free or hands-off approach to managing its elite employees, seemingly with little direct control over labor processes, which appear to move away from industrial forms of labor control. But on another level, it has adopted, adapted, and extended a form innovated by Western Electric, a method built on science and data for managing its workforce.
Few would question that the search engine business is driven by data, but it is less well understood that this extends to Google's labor management and is an integral part of its organizational culture. The firm has refashioned its human resource functions, mimicking scientific objectivity by applying data across the depth and breadth of its welfare programs. It calls its human resources department People Operations (POps). According to Laszlo Bock, former senior vice president of people operations for Google, POps consists of people from three different backgrounds—one-third of the staff have traditional human resources training, another third come from strategy consulting, and the last third consists of academics from fields as disparate as organizational psychology and physics.76 The department manages various aspects of its employees’ lives and operates on the principle that “All people decisions at Google are based on data and analytics.”77 It claims to distinguish itself from the traditional human resources department in that its decisions are backed by data and science. If Ford had its sociological department and Western Electric had Mayo's research team, Google has POps, where scientists collect detailed data on workers’ behaviors and activities through interviews, focus groups, ethnographies, and surveys. As Google explained on its blog in 2012, “We apply science to organizational issues as well.”78 The company thus wants its personnel staff to emulate a science lab by using methods by which everything is observed, measured, and tested. In the interest of increasing workers’ productivity, POps has experimented with their seemingly mundane everyday activities—“happiness,” lunch lines, and food choices.
In a 2013 New York Times interview, Google spokesperson Jordan Newman proudly alluded to Google's overarching management principle as “creat[ing] the happiest, most productive workplace in the world.”79 The connection between workers’ happiness and productivity has been studied and broadly embraced by businesses and written about in the business literature,80 but Google claims to establish this through data and scientific analysis. In 2006 the company created the People Analytics team within POps to observe and measure the emotional states of employees using a mix of quantitative and qualitative data analyses that dissect workers’ satisfaction or “happiness” levels and link them to benefits, perks, salaries, talent management, hiring, and all other human resources issues, encompassing many aspects of employees’ lives.
The tech journalist Farhad Manjoo corroborated this, writing about how Google uses its employee data tracking system to empirically quantify as many aspects of workers’ lives as it can.81 Manjoo recounts that POps even measured the employee lunch line and found that between three and four minutes was the optimal sweet spot for workers to have time to meet new people but at the same time not “waste time.” He writes that the tables, which look like those in high school cafeterias, are considered ideal because the company can put employees in close proximity to each other to spur conversations and share information.82 As “people walk down between the chairs, they bump into each other—it's actually called a ‘Google bump,’” according to John Sullivan, a management professor at San Francisco State University and a workplace consultant.83 This is no accident; it is Google by design.84
Google's interest in the management of its employees has even reached the level of individual diets. Jennifer Kurkoski, who has a PhD in organizational behavior and was part of the People Analytic team, had experimented with changing workers’ eating habits. She explained, “When employees are healthy, they're happy. When they're happy, they're innovative.”85 Kurkoski once conducted research on how Google employees could make better food choices by rearranging the location of food, resizing plates, and replacing food containers to reengineer employees’ eating behaviors.86 The objective behind this experiment was to understand ways to “nudge” the food intake and food choices of employees. The irony was that on one hand, Google provides access to free food to increase productivity; on the other, the company has found that it needs to deal with the negative result of providing unlimited access to food at any time, namely, risks to workers’ health. This seems like a benign experiment that could be considered an act of true care for workers; however, poor health also directly affects workers’ capacity to perform their tasks and ultimately affects Google's bottom line. Stressing a rigorous science, Google presents POps research as transcending the social context in which powerful corporate interests are embedded in the production of scientific knowledge.
People Operations’ experimentation with Google's welfare programs stretches beyond the workplace to workers’ behavioral psychology. The company has probed the minutiae of diet but also tried to engineer interactions between workers and team dynamics. Bock stated, “We try to bring as much analytics and data and science to what we do on the people side as our engineers do on the product side.” He emphasized that Google even has data on productivity based on the relationships between new employees and their managers. He once noted that “when an employee starts on their first day, we have data that says, if the manager shows up and says, ‘Hi[,] nice to meet you, you're on my team, we're gonna be working together,’ and does a few other things, those people end up 15 percent more productive in nine months.”87 And this is only a minor part of Google's data-driven management. Concerned about employee turnover, which could have a negative effect on its ability to compete, Google even built an algorithm to identify the employees who were most likely to leave based on employee reviews, promotions, and pay histories.88 In Bock's words, Google did so to “get inside people's heads even before they know they might leave.”89
At the same time, it also mines data to modify employees’ behavior. Google has emphasized nonhierarchical empowerment of individuals but still decided to institute a hierarchical structure, especially as it grew into a mid-sized and then a large corporation. In order to reconcile this apparent conflict between professed values and actual practices, it needed to convince its engineers that managers were necessary, since they had long been acculturated to the idea that managers were obstacles.90 The solution was data that justified the benefit of managers to its engineers.91
In 2008 Google launched a premier project called Project Oxygen to identify the traits of its highest-performing managers. A team of researchers gathered more than ten thousand observations about managers and their performance reviews, employee feedback surveys, and nominations for top manager awards.92 The researchers then coded, analyzed, and extracted general patterns from these data and built hypotheses. The analysis resulted in a set of rules called “Eight Good Manager's Behaviors and Three Pitfalls,” which was incorporated into Google's management training program. Karen May, Google's vice president of people development, who led the redesign of the employee training program in 2012, summed up the core of Google's new management philosophy: “What's important is that it aligns with our overall business strategy.”93
In 2012, as a sequel to Project Oxygen, Google launched Project Aristotle in search of the most effective and productive teams. Abeer Dubey, a manager in the People Analytics Division, assembled a team of statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists, and engineers to study how teams work across Google worked, which team dynamics were helpful or harmful, and the characteristics of the best teams.94 According to Julia Rozovsky, a POps analyst, the team spent two years studying more than 180 Google teams, conducting more than 200 interviews, and dissecting more than 250 different team attributes to find out what makes a team effective.95 We may ask, though, effective for whom and for what purposes? Google's experimentation bears a striking resemblance to the Hawthorne studies of a century earlier: In both, workers are being surveyed, studied, and experimented on as capital searches for ways to control and optimize the labor process. Brian Welle, a psychologist and the director of People Analytics at the company, said, “At Google, you need to engage people not just as subjects, but as experimenters.”96
Google's supposedly unconventional management style is, thus, far from unconventional; rather, it dances between the paternalistic “we care” worker-centered welfare capitalism and data-driven social and behavioral science and scientific labor management to get inside workers’ heads to increase productivity and maintain stability in its workforce. Moreover, these techniques are not exclusively applied to highly skilled and other paid workers. As described in Chapter 3, Google's workforce also includes unpaid user labor, and the company uses the same approach to managing them. The search engine firm has been scientifically managing users for decades, investing enormous capital in research on users as well as giving them “free” services as a form of welfare program on capital's behalf. By espousing welfare programs along with scientific management, Google wants to get inside all users’ heads—and Google was doing so to unpaid labor long before it got inside its own workers’ heads. This is the actual essence of the Google tenet “focus on the user and all else will follow.”
Google's efforts to manage its employees and users, encouraging them to believe that it differed from other corporations, seemed to work when there were fewer firms encroaching on its territory of profit. But this image has tarnished in recent years. For one thing, the exploitative ways in which Internet companies generate their wealth has been revealed, and Google's paradise has been shown to be for only a few select workers at the top. For another, even some of its elite workers began to realize that Google's “open” and “democratic” culture was only valid when it helped Google's bottom line.
In recent years there has been increasing resistance from white-collar tech workers within the company who have spoken out against management, challenging Google's labor practices, military contracts, surveillance, and sexual discrimination and racism and demanding that the company live up to its former motto, “Don't be evil.” In 2018 more than twenty thousand workers walked off their jobs, protesting against the company's handling of sexual harassment cases and its inadequate policies concerning equity and transparency. In 2019 a group of Google contract workers from a third-party vendor, HCL Technologies, a subsidiary of an Indian contracting company in Pittsburgh, PA—the historic home for radical labor movements including the railroad strike of 1877 and the Homestead steel strike of 1892—formed a union with the United Steel Workers.97 In January 2020, the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) was formed with support from the Communications Workers of America. The union is open to all workers including TVCs.
Google is not alone in facing this move toward unionization. Workers in other tech giants like Facebook and Amazon have also been mobilizing to organize unions, and these efforts go back decades. Silicon Valley's wealth was built on the open shop, and the industry has a long history of undermining workers’ efforts to organize.98 For two decades starting in the 1970s until factories were offshored to Asia, workers in semiconductor manufacturing plants fought for unionization and for the dignity of labor; in the 1990s Apple janitorial contract workers called for a boycott of Apple products and joined the nationwide organizing campaign by the Service Employees International Union known as Justice for Janitors, and pressured Apple to sign a contract with the SEIU; in 2019 contract cafeteria workers in tech companies, whose wages started at $35,000 per year, joined the local chapter of Unite Here. Before the creation of the AWU, tech shuttle bus drivers in the Valley and Facebook cafeteria workers—a majority of whom are women and people of color—fought for and succeeded in unionizing. Today, the Amazon warehouse workers’ grassroots union drive shows the possibility of a resurgence of labor movements in the United States. Although Google's union of white-collar tech workers is a new development, it is part of this longer history of labor struggles.
In response to its workers’ resistance, Google is taking both overt and covert actions to intimidate them. The company began to restrict workplace speech, implementing tighter rules on internal discussion forums and replacing its weekly all-hands meetings, where employees had once been encouraged to ask hard questions, with monthly product launch talks.99 Using a tactic familiar in corporate America, Google employed the union-busting consulting firm IRI to suppress workers’ organizing efforts and urged the government to overturn a 2014 law that allowed workers to use employers’ email to organize unions during nonworking time.100 In 2019 Google fired four engineers who spoke out against management and protested against Google's contracts with US Customs and Border Patrol. After investigating Google's dismissal of these employees, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed complaints against Google for interfering with workers’ legal rights to discuss workplace issues, which are guaranteed by section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act.101 The Board revealed that Google had secretly operated the anti-union drive “Project Vivian” between 2018 and 2020 to “engage employees more positively and convince them that unions suck.”102
On one hand, the company is running anti-union drives and tightening up its control over workers behind the scenes, but on the other, Google is also turning up its public relations campaign to promote its slogan “We care.” To show the community that it cares, Google announced that it would provide $1 billion for affordable housing in the Bay area as the company expands its multi-million-dollar campus, integrating a large part of downtown San Jose, California. It is casting this extension as a “co-community development” with green space, education, housing, arts, and cultural centers. In an Ars Technica interview, Alexa Aren, Google's San Jose development director, recounted that this new venture was “much less the corporate campus” and more like “a resilient neighborhood.”103 This recalls National Cash Register's strategy of promoting the open shop in the nineteenth century as well as creating a benevolent corporate image by commissioning urban planning, city beautification, and arts as part of its “welfare work” program.
Google has not yet established a clear strategy for handling its internal labor unrest, and the question of how Google will respond in the long term to the newly established union remains open. The company is facing intense domestic and international competition and myriad external regulatory pressures, both domestically and internationally. In light of this, it is unclear whether Google will be able to continue to repair and maintain its image of open culture and benign capitalism while operating under an imperative to compete and generate profit.
Google's management practices have long been perceived in the mainstream media as new and exceptional. Contrary to this perception, the company's strategies are the evolution of modes of control that are rooted in industrial capitalism. Scientific management and corporate welfare have, in fact, not disappeared in the new economy, and Google's practices are not radically new. We have seen in this chapter that despite the changing political economy and technology, capital accumulation is still based on the same modes of labor control. Early corporate welfare programs began with selective skilled workers in non-union sectors before they reached a wider segment of workers.104 In this sense, Google's model resembles an earlier version of welfare capitalism but is designed to target the elite class in non-union tech firms.
Backed by data, science, and the interactive nature of Internet technologies, the current practices of welfare capitalism have a façade of democracy that conceals the exploitative relationship between capital and labor as if capitalism could be built on democratic and participatory ideals. Although Taylorism has been roundly criticized for its dehumanization of workers, a new stage in the historical arc of Taylorism is reemerging that is celebrated today as “scientific” and that has been adopted by Google and other Internet firms. And this time, scientific management is not only being applied to low-level factory workers but to the entire spectrum of elite workers, low-paid labor, and unpaid labor in tech industry as well.
Google has rebranded scientific management and corporate welfare programs rather than transforming power structures. It has been able to extract more surplus value by adapting industrial-era labor control techniques and has built its business on the long suppression of organized labor in Silicon Valley.
In 2018 Google became a trillion-dollar company, but that wealth wasn't accumulated by its search algorithm, as it claims. Rather, it was built on exploitation and control of labor that was rapidly internationalized in the search for new markets and new labor. Next, Chapter 5 scrutinizes the different economic zones of China and the European Union, where US capital is facing the most resistance, to shed light on the conflict among the intercapitalist states over the Internet to illustrate the dynamics of global capitalism.