Rally Speech: Drawing a Line
[Speech given to Tableau employees at “Drawing A Line: Tableau Rally For Human Rights,” an employee demonstration held on October 29, 2019. Lightly edited for clarity and sourcing.]
Thanks to all of you who have come out today.
Over the last few years, as violations of migrants’ rights have multiplied, employees at tech companies have started taking notice. First, grass-roots organizations like Mijente started the #NoTechForIce movement, asking tech companies to stop working with ICE and CBP. And it was workers, at one company after another, who answered the call!
Last summer, employees of Microsoft demanded that their company cancel all contracts with ICE. They said, “We … recognize the grave responsibility that those creating powerful technology have, to ensure what they build is used for good, and not for harm.”
That same month, employees at Salesforce, a company you may have heard of, said this: “… we believe that our core value of Equality is at stake and that Salesforce should re-examine our contractual relationship with CBP and speak out against its practices.”.
Then Amazon employees demanded that Amazon Web Services stop enabling ICE, and their new coworkers at Whole Foods offered their support.
Since then, the situation for migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers coming to the US has only gotten worse, and the calls to end tech-industry support for ICE have only grown.
This summer, employees sent letters to management at Google and Palantir. Wayfair employees staged a “Wayfair walkout” in protest of doing business with an ICE subcontractor.
Just in September, at a local tech startup called Chef, a former employee protested its relationship with ICE by deleting critical open-source code. The CEO of Chef made a “principled decision” to continue business as usual. Then four days later, he reversed course. Here’s what the CEO said about doing business with ICE: “It is clear that checks and balances have not provided relief to the fundamental issues of the policies in question. Chef, as well as other companies, can take stronger positions against these policies that violate basic human rights.”
Basic. Human. Rights. We couldn’t agree more!
We have been inspired by these bold words and courageous actions at other companies. And we want to work at a company that does well by doing good. We have gone to our management team and asked questions at meetings and raised concerns. On June 26, we sent a Human Rights Employee Resolution declaring that we would demonstrate unless Tableau made the principled choice. Almost 20% of our US-based employees signed on in less than a month. I’m sure many of you here added your name for your co-workers to see — thank you for your courage and for taking that stand with us.
To the leadership team’s credit, they did engage and discuss. But to our disappointment, they did not make meaningful change at this time. And so we are here today.
Now we’d like to hear from you. When did you decide to draw a line and realize that being complicit in abuses of migrants was wrong? Did you draw a line when kids were separated from their parents at the border? Did you draw a line when migrants were caged? Did you draw a line when, not far from here in Tacoma, immigrants in a private prison were treated so badly that they went on a mass hunger strike?
[Note: At this point, attendees had the opportunity to write on a notecard and share their own “I drew a line when …” moment. You can see a selection of their responses here.]
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Summary statement: Drawing a Line
