My father, John Stanley Ford, was the first black software engineer in America, hired by IBM in 1946. In his day, there were no unions, and IBM’s founder, Thomas J Watson, sought to keep it that way. Watson offered healthcare, paid college tuition and access to IBM country clubs – all of which helped thrill most employees into never questioning whether they should organize for greater rights, like freedom from workplace discrimination. When I started as a software engineer at the company a quarter-century later, employees still enjoyed healthcare and country clubs but had very few rights. It was IBM’s black workers who first fought to change this.

I'm the Google whistleblower. The medical data of millions of Americans is at risk | Anonymous Read more

Last week Google fired four employees who had been organizing their fellow workers to demand greater equality and an end to the company’s work on inhumane government and military projects. This week, the workers announced they are suing the company. This could be a turning point in the story of the ‘techlash’, but it’s impossible to understand this moment’s full significance without seeing how it fits into the long history of tech activism.

The year I joined IBM, 1970, was also the year the National Black Workers Alliance of IBM (BWA) was born, the first-ever movement of hi-tech minority workers. BWA sought to provide black IBM employees with equal pay and better opportunities for promotion, and to develop a pipeline funneling talented young people from poor communities through college and into the company’s highest ranks. They also hoped to be a “watchdog”, ensuring the morality of IBM’s policies and practices.

IBM’s retaliation against BWA was swift and brutal, especially after the alliance obtained company documents revealing a systemic pattern of discrimination against black employees. BWA leaders were given poor performance evaluations, denied pay raises, accused of violating company policy by disclosing pay and promotion information, and, in at least one case, falsely accused of sexual abuse. They were demoted, fired or forced to resign.

Under such harassment, in May 1982, Edward Thomas Mann, an IBM systems engineer in Maryland, “snapped”: he drove through a plate-glass door at his office, opened fire with automatic weapons, and killed three people. (So one of the first mass shootings of the modern era centered on workers of color advocating for their rights inside what was then the world’s largest hi-tech firm.)

But the brutal tactics that IBM deployed against organizing workers of color in the 1970s and early 1980s are nothing compared with the cruel technologies the company has developed. In 1928, Watson deployed his fledgling company’s early computing power to support the Jamaica Study, run by the New York-based Eugenics Record Office, and successfully identified mixed-race individuals on the island of Jamaica for forced sterilization and other means of population control.

Five years later, IBM harnessed its technology to serve Hitler and the Third Reich, automating many aspects of the German war effort and the Holocaust. Later, IBM turned to South Africa, helping to computerize much of the bureaucracy that helped enforce apartheid. (The black workers of BWA were some of the few to speak up against IBM’s deep engagement with the apartheid regime, which became yet another reason its members were hounded and harassed.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Thomas J Watson, head of IBM and president of the International Chamber of Commerce, and members of the board of the ICC meet with Adolf Hitler in Berlin, Germany, in 1937. Photograph: Associated Press

Then, post-9/11, IBM used secret CCTV footage of New York City residents, without their knowledge, to improve their facial recognition technology’s ability to discriminate based on skin color.

IBM’s past has several present echoes at Google. One of the many things members of the Thanksgiving Four organized against was Google supplying technology and “knowhow” to Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other border agencies, for use against migrants seeking asylum – several of whom have died in US detention. “We have only to look to IBM’s role working with the Nazis during the Holocaust to understand the role that technology can play in automating mass atrocity,” read an open letter, signed by nearly 1,500 Google employees, protesting against such work.

The Thanksgiving Four and other worker-activists are carrying on BWA’s mission

In October 2019, reports surfaced that Google had surreptitiously recorded homeless black people to improve their facial recognition technology’s ability to discriminate between races – much as IBM had done following 9/11. And where IBM in the 1970s had harassed organizing workers of color with claims that they had violated company policy, Google wants us to believe it fired the Thanksgiving Four because they violated the company’s data security policies.

What the black workers of BWA sought in the 1970s has not come to pass – harassment and discrimination of many kinds is still rife within tech companies. But the Thanksgiving Four and other worker-activists are carrying on BWA’s mission. Three of the fired Google workers identify as LGBT, and had been organizing their colleagues to demand that Google provide the same benefits for same-sex partnerships that they provide to other couples. Many Google worker-activists are also fighting for their rights to organize (and, if they choose, unionize) for a workplace as inclusive and diverse as Google’s consumers.

If BWA became enough of a threat to IBM that the company decided it had to silence BWA’s members, this was in part because IBM refused to change. That Google has fired the Thanksgiving Four suggests that it too is choosing to stay a course that many of its workers – and many more people outside the company – consider profoundly unethical.

IBM can never expunge the moral stain of its racist history, or its complicity in past atrocities. But Google and other tech giants can awaken to the terrible damage they are doing to society before it’s too late.