BY KYLE BARNES
You can still take these jobs. You can still work at a company profiting off of apartheid, off of the abuse of human rights, off of the dissolution of democracy. And you may very well have good reasons for why you are working this job. While I encourage you to consider any and all alternatives as laid out for you, the choice is yours to make. However, the work doesn’t end when you sign an offer letter. No, it’s only just beginning.
If you haven’t started your job or internship, but are starting to think about what it will be like, and how you can bring your ethics into the workplace, then great! This is an essential first step. In order to make our voices heard, we have to have clearly articulated and well-established values. This isn’t to say that there isn’t room for your values to change as you learn more or as you understand the role of the work you do, but that coming into your job or internship without any understanding of your values or desire to impact the ethical direction of the company is akin to enabling your company to take the path of least resistance towards profit. This may work out fine, or you may find yourself in a position where the work you are doing or the people you are interacting with are morally troubling.
Come into your work with a set of values. Think deeply about how those values may be challenged or ignored. Prepare what you will do if and when that happens. You have to if you want your labor to count. Because despite all the assurances of the moral direction or team culture or mission-driven nature of a workplace, it’s still a workplace. Your labor is more powerful than you think, especially when considered in the collective. Here are some tips:
It’s vital to articulate personal values before starting a job, particularly if it is at a large company with a variety of contracts and limited transparency. Establishing the values you hold, and what you will do if and when they are challenged will impact much of your experience in the workforce. As you think about what actions in the world you care about or care about fighting, be sure to foreground conversations — you can and should discuss your values in community with those you trust.
Here are a few questions you may want to ask yourself in preparation for starting a new job. These are mere suggestions and I can’t answer them for you, but I can pose them as a guide for articulating values such that you are prepared to be critical of the ideological indoctrination of employment.
Decide what actions by your company and the people within it you won’t tolerate. When do you refuse to work for something you don’t believe in? When do you demand change within the company? When do you take it and let it happen, and how do you ensure it doesn’t escalate? All these questions, and more, you should be asking yourself before you start working. Here are a few more, and of course check out our card deck to have even more conversations with yourself and with others:
What will you do if you aren’t told how clients or users will use the technology you develop?
What will you do when a moral or ethical choice or development goal is explained as unnecessary or impossible due to a time constraint?
What will you do if a manager makes a sexually or racially inappropriate remark?
What will you do if you find out what you’re working on is sold to a military government? to a fascist group?
What will you do if your coworkers dismiss the labor of manual laborers in the workplace, like custodians or other staff?
What actions would cause you to leave your job in protest?
Onboarding to a new company is exciting! It is also a way that companies get new employees to adopt the same values as the team. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it becomes indoctrination when it forces you to reassess or change your own values to fit with those of the company. From there, it’s not long before they start asking you to do things you may not agree with. It’s important, therefore, to be aware of what you are looking for ethically from your job prior to, rather than in response to, actions taken by the company.
Culture matters, but often culture is used as an excuse for a company to obscure or even celebrate actions with questionable moral impacts — like Project Nimbus or contracts with ICE.
<aside> 🗣 For example, Google’s old motto of “don’t be evil” opens up a question of what you do instead — good, right? But what is good? Then we get to fundamental ideas of good like providing information as a uniform good. So don’t be evil by providing more information, which is Google’s product. Any actions that help Google provide more information is good, which means that any actions that are good for Google are good for the world. This is a circular logic that leads us to Google taking contracts like Project Nimbus without question. We have to be ready to question how company values operate.
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Know, too, that there will be co-workers whom you respect and admire that betray your values. Maybe they will do so nakedly, but likely they will do so under the guise of necessity, or of doing good in other ways, or of pleasing upper management. Maybe they will do so through racist microaggressions, or through dehumanization of manual laborers in the workplace. Regardless, chances are it will happen, so you should be ready with the actions you will take should you witness it and want to do something about it.
You have to be ready to decide the best mode of action to take in this case. You have to know how you might want to confront them, or take other forms of addressing the action. Because if they do this once, chances are they will do it again. If you let it keep happening, when do you draw the line?