In an era of nondisclosure agreements and forced arbitration, it can seem like one rule of working for a technology company is that you don’t talk about working for that technology company.
Cher Scarlett is breaking that rule.
Scarlett, originally of Walla Walla, Washington, has worked for multiple tech companies and, in the process, has become an outspoken labor rights organizer and whistleblower. From 2015 to 2016, she worked as a software engineer at the video game company Activision Blizzard. While there, she would often commiserate with coworkers about the company’s treatment of women and minority employees. Scarlett’s own experiences, she told The Washington Post in 2021, involved being “underpaid, harassed, and, on two separate occasions, groped at company events.”
After Scarlett left Blizzard, she continued to develop software at a range of other jobs: at World Wide Technology, Starbucks (where she also advocated for equitable pay), and Webflow, before being hired as a principal software engineer with the security team at Apple. In a personal essay published on Medium in December 2021, Scarlett described her career arc and how she felt she had finally found her “dream job” at Apple.
On May 12, 2021, Scarlett tweeted her opinion regarding Apple’s hiring of Antonio García Martínez, a controversial figure in the tech world. Martínez wrote the Silicon Valley memoir Chaos Monkeys, in which he described “most of the women in the Bay Area” as being “soft and weak.”
In August 2021, after speaking informally with numerous colleagues regarding pay rates, disparities, and other issues, Scarlett was again moved to action, posting a survey asking workers about their salaries on Twitter and a Slack account used by Apple employees.
The survey initially received 2,000 responses. (Scarlett notes in an email to The Progressive that responses are still coming in and have grown to “more than 3,000.”) While Apple has long claimed it has achieved pay equity, the informal survey found a wage gap at Apple between men’s and women’s salaries.
There was pushback to the survey; Scarlett received “obscene submissions” and was subjected to other harassment for posting it, although her right to do so is protected by labor law. Also in August 2021, Scarlett and other Apple employees started a forum they called “#AppleToo,” with a website, Twitter account, and a Discord server. To date, hundreds of Apple employees have shared stories and information about harassment, discrimination, and other abuses, and the organizers have shared many of those firsthand responses on Medium.
Because employees’ rights to discuss earnings and employment issues are protected under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 [NLRA], Scarlett filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). She stated in that complaint that Apple HR had engaged in “coercive and suppressive activity that has enabled abuse and harassment of organizers of protected concerted activity.”
In November 2021, Scarlett left the company after reaching a private agreement with Apple. She agreed to withdraw her NLRB complaint in exchange for a one-year severance package and Apple’s acknowledgment to its employees that they have the legal right to discuss their salaries and other workplace conditions.
But Scarlett has not withdrawn her complaint, she said in December, because Apple did not live up to the terms of its agreement. Although the company posted an internal memo about employees’ rights to discuss employment conditions, it did so on the day before Apple employees left for Thanksgiving. By the following Monday, the memo had already been removed. (The NLRB also denied Scarlett’s November petition to withdraw the complaint and requested Apple make twenty-two changes to the settlement agreement, which Apple refused.)
In sexual and racial harassment and discrimination cases, when does illegality and abuse of power against individuals start to become a danger to public health and safety?
Scarlett, on her personal web site and on a GoFundMe page she started to cover the legal expenses incurred while at Apple, identifies herself as a whistleblower. “When do we blow whistles?” Scarlett tells The Progressive. “For survival, for emergencies, when we or others need help . . . Apple shouldn’t be able to claim I disparaged them for talking about what I reasonably believed to be violations of the NLRA, right? These things are a matter of public interest because of the harm they do.”
The question of what harm is being done to whom is at the heart of what makes a whistleblower a whistleblower. There are countless definitions of the term, but one of the broadest is provided by the Government Accountability Project: a whistleblower is “an employee who discloses information that s/he reasonably believes is evidence of illegality, gross waste or fraud, mismanagement, abuse of power, general wrongdoing, or a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety.”
In sexual and racial harassment and discrimination cases, when does illegality and abuse of power against individuals start to become a danger to public health and safety?
Lawsuits alleging a “culture of rampant sexual harassment” and “racial discrimination” have been filed by employees of Tesla, the electric vehicle company founded by Elon Musk.
In July 2021, employees at Ubisoft, a video game company, published an open letter on Twitter, charging that the company was doing nothing to address employee concerns.
“It has been over a year since the first revelations of systemic discrimination, harassment, and bullying within Ubisoft came out,” the letter noted. “However, we have seen nothing more than a year of kind words, empty promises, and an inability or unwillingness to remove known offenders.”
Historically, it has not been easy to keep track of individual employees’ charges of discrimination. Nevertheless, the staggering number of individual reports of discrimination or harrassment in the tech world indicate that their charges do, in fact, represent a “danger to public health and safety.”
As Scarlett tells The Progressive, “Many of these large companies, especially in tech, have carefully crafted shiny images that they spend millions upon millions of dollars every year to maintain. They do it because it’s how they stay in control of the narrative.”
To illustrate how closely tech companies monitor social media, Scarlett points to a recent Twitter thread in which she questioned Meta’s use of facial recognition software. Meta’s new chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, responded on the thread, assuring her that the company “never tagged people in random photos of people they weren’t connected to.”
In her response to Bosworth, Scarlett continued to try to make the larger implications more clear: “a ‘connection’ in this context means you could have had a single mutual friend.” To The Progressive, Scarlett notes, “The public should be demanding transparency into understanding the implications of this kind of technology, and what exactly Meta plans to do with it in the future.”
These are not isolated incidents and they are not taking place in small, inconsequential companies.
How tech companies surveil and treat their workers (and anyone who questions their products’ “features”) should be cause for broader concern; these are not isolated incidents and they are not taking place in small, inconsequential companies.
Activision Blizzard, for example, was just acquired for $69 billion by Microsoft, making it the world’s third largest gaming company. Microsoft will inherit Activision Blizzard’s ongoing harassment lawsuit, impacting its shareholders and its customers.
On March 4, Apple held its annual shareholders' meeting virtually. Although shareholders were urged by several proxy advisory firms to accept a variety of proposals seeking more transparency in the company's methods, and some proposals passed, others, like a proposal that Apple report information about its gender and racial pay gap, failed."
Meanwhile, the shareholders approved a proposal that Apple “oversee a third-party civil rights audit of the company's policies and practices,” meant to address inequality and the treatment of marginalized groups.
“We rely on the public to demand transparency from these companies, and to scrutinize their behavior,” Scarlet says. “Make noise, and show you care. Write letters. Sign and share petitions. Donate funds where you can, or withhold shopping. Scrutinize these companies and ask others to do so, too. None of us wants to be controlled, yet how much of our lives are controlled by a few enormous corporations?”