In 2002, Kessels and Keursten wrote, “When in the 21st-century knowledge productivity becomes the driving force, and as this knowledge production will be found at every level of economic activity, the knowledge workers will take charge.”
I see that prediction coming true in numerous organizations where workers are actively impacting the policies and strategy of organizations, as the following 2018 headlines attest:
- Google to Drop Pentagon AI Contract After Employee Objections to the “Business of War,” The Washington Post, June 1, 2018
- Microsoft Employees Protest Work with ICE, as Tech Industry Mobilizes Over Immigration, New York Times, June 19, 2018
- Nike CEO Apologizes for Corporate Culture That Excluded Some Staff, Wall Stree Journal Dec 19, 2018,Bloomberg, May 4, 2018; New York Times, May 5 2018
- Employees Call on Deloitte to Stop Working with ICE, New York Times, July 12, 2018
- PWC’s Millennial Employees Led a Rebellion – and Their Demands Are Being Met, Quartz at Work, March 20, 2018
- Google Employees Protest Secret Work on Censored Search Engine for China, New York Times, Aug 16, 2018
- Employee Uprisings Sweep Many Tech Companies. Not Twitter, New York Times, July 4, 2018
In each of these companies, employees disagreed with management policies, by written letters, meetings with management or walkouts. What is so different from past employee uprisings is that these protests are not about demanding something like better wages or shorter working hours; instead they are challenging the ethics of the organizations they work for. These employees feel they have the right to influence their organization's policies, ethics and mission.
It is not coincidental that these organizations are primarily composed of knowledge workers. Knowledge workers frequently have much greater insight into their products and services than those at the top of the organization, thus they are not easily replaced. Far from being just human resources, they constitute the intellectual capital of these organizations. With that awareness, knowledge workers view themselves more as associates or even partners, than as employees.
A letter, signed by thousands of Google employees, addressed to Google’s chief
executive Sundar Pichai, illustrates this shift in how knowledge workers view their role. The letter said, “Here, we address an underlying structural problem: currently we do not have the information required to make ethically-informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment…. We urgently need more transparency, a seat at the table, and a commitment to clear and open processes: Google employees need to know what we’re building.” Among the five items of oversight employees asked for in that letter was, “A clear plan for transparency sufficient to enable Googlers an individual ethical choice about what they work on.”
These Google employees, as well as employees in many other organizations, now assume their right to work on products and services that meet their ethical standards, and when those standards are not met, rather than leave the organization, as employees in the past might have done, they expect the organization to change, because they are the organization.