In the first part of her SILENT WORKS essay, urban researcher Katja Schwaller explored how ‘critical infrastructure’ has emerged from the shadows of the collective consciousness into the spotlight during the COVID-19 pandemic, naturally becoming a playground for Big Tech companies. In the second part, she focuses on the living conditions of workers in the ‘underdog’ version of the privatized Big Tech city, without whose labor Silicon Valley urbanism could not function at all.
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Silicon Valley urbanism, the gig economy, privatization of critical infrastructure – the first part of this essay examined how tech companies in the Bay Area helped set the course for pandemic urbanism and the highly unequal social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. While corporations like Amazon are raking in record profits and massively expand their monopoly, more and more workers are forced to work under hazardous and highly precarious conditions for companies like Uber or Amazon. However, the attack on critical infrastructure and unionized sectors by the ‘disruptors’ from Silicon Valley affects more than public transportation, the postal service, the taxi industry, and various supply chains. The prison system, the critical infrastructure of a (lacking) health insurance, a racially biased police apparatus, labor laws, and markers of social inequality literally carved into the urban landscape – such as residential segregation – are also (infra)structural conditions. And these, too, are sometimes shaped by tech companies and Silicon Valley ideology, as was already discussed in the first part of this essay.
Recent protests in the Bay Area, too, brought the interplay of various social crises to the fore – from institutional racism to precarious working conditions, from the disruption of public infrastructure to the exploitation of unpaid (digital) labor, from tech-driven gentrification to the current health crisis. As an example, this essay focuses on the latest Black Lives Matter protests near Facebook’s world headquarters in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley. With its platform-based social ‘echo chambers,’ the corporation has effectively taken over swaths of the U.S. media infrastructure and thereby plays a decisive role in shaping political developments. The company, however, also significantly expanded its local sphere of influence over the past few years. The latest item on its expansion list, for instance, is a ‘new economy’ company town, which is set to feature employee housing, ‘public’ facilities, its own town square, and a park.
Segregation and Abundance
By no means, however, is everyone who works for Facebook classified as an employee. Many instead work for outsourced subcontractors. This is particularly true for service jobs in the company’s own cafeterias, building maintenance, janitorial services, and other low-wage positions. In contrast to the highly paid programmers and software engineers, this segment of the workforce comes primarily from marginalized and neighboring communities. For example from East Palo Alto, a historically Black and segregated town that up until today remains cut off from Silicon Valley’s wealth, yet feels the negative impacts of the tech industry all the more acutely. This includes the environmental and health hazards of silicon chip production, which in the 1970s and 1980s was still based here in the Valley. Until today, children in East Palo Alto are 2.5 times more likely to suffer from asthma than in surrounding communities, while household income is just half that of neighboring areas.
[Black Lives Matter protest in East Palo Alto; photo by Katja Schwaller, 2020]
In the words of a local Latina activist whose parents worked for Silicon Valley companies for decades without ever seeing any of the incentives and benefits that are a given for higher-paid employees in the tech industry:
“Companies like Facebook are a veritable playground for high-earning employees. You can go to the gym during work hours and have every kind of food you can imagine served to you – for free, of course. But those who clean up after them and serve the food are struggling to have a roof and a meal. And that actually describes the way of life in East Palo Alto quite well: You’re always struggling, while everything around you is awash in abundance.”
Even before the pandemic deepened social divides, a study by the Second Harvest Food Bank found that one in four people in Silicon Valley – one of the wealthiest regions in the world – faces food insecurity. According to the 2020 Silicon Valley Index, nearly 90% of elementary school students in East Palo Alto receive free or reduced-price school lunches due to poverty. At the same time, rent hikes and evictions resulting from tech-driven gentrification have led to nearly one-third of schoolchildren being homeless. Many sleep with their families in RVs without adequate sanitation facilities on the side streets of the world-famous Valley.
Repressive Infrastructure
This, in turn, fuels the expansion of repressive infrastructure. In a highly controversial move, Facebook recently even attempted to purchase a local police unit. The company offered the city of Menlo Park to pay the salaries of five additional police officers, who would be tasked specifically with patrolling the company’s sprawling campus complex. This complex is located between two predominantly non-white, low-income neighborhoods, Belle Haven and East Palo Alto.
Despite the outcry from the affected neighborhoods, which have long complained about racial profiling and incidents of racist police violence due to the presence of Facebook and other high-profile industries, the ‘Facebook Unit’ was implemented. Although Facebook’s funds are no longer directly earmarked for police officers’ salaries, this does not fundamentally change Facebook’s influence on local politics.
[Facebook bikes at the company world headquarters in Menlo Park; photo by Katja Schwaller, 2022]
This entanglement of a racially biased police apparatus with the power of a tech company is also exemplified by the infrastructure of the company’s own Facebook-blue bicycles. These are made available free of charge to highly paid employees so they can cycle from one campus building to another. Often, however, this corporate infrastructure also encroaches on surrounding residential areas, where the bikes are simply left lying around. But when residents accept the ‘invitation’ and also use the ‘free’ bikes as a spontaneous means of transportation, police checks occur time and again.
This is a prime example of how corporate power can be expanded even through free services – much like Facebook’s digital ‘friendship platforms,’ which, while initially free for users, are only available in exchange for sensitive user data and unpaid digital labor. And it illustrates how a free service for some can become a stumbling block for less privileged groups. After all, how exactly does the police distinguish between authorized Facebook employees and those using a bicycle without a permit? Given that less than 10% of official Facebook employees in the U.S. are Black or Hispanic, while these groups make up over 70% of the population of East Palo Alto and Belle Haven, allegations of racial profiling are hardly unfounded.
„No Facebook Police!“
But Facebook’s local sphere of influence doesn’t end there. Even philanthropy can serve as a tool for expanding corporate dominance. This becomes evident, for example, when a monetary donation by Big Tech leads to the renaming of San Francisco’s public hospital to Zuckerberg General Hospital, after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Or when many of the organizations and NGOs in East Palo Alto that are fighting against the negative impacts of the company’s local presence are funded by Facebook. In the words of local activist Ofelia Bello: “What Facebook has done is co-opt some of the local NGOs that are doing really important work. This is a huge problem, because it fuels distrust in a community that is already struggling.”
Residents have long criticized these power entanglements. Most recently and pointedly, local Black Lives Matter protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis highlighted these complicities. “Don’t participate in events organized by Facebook. Stay away from their ‘farmers’ market.’ Don’t let Facebook co-opt you,” advises JT Faraji of the Real Community Coalition to the residents who have gathered on this afternoon in June 2020 in East Palo Alto to protest police violence, institutional racism, and the role of local tech companies.
[East Palo Alto protesters crossing a pedestrian overpass into Palo Alto; photo by Katja Schwaller, 2020]
To this end, the demonstrators first cross the multi-lane highway that cuts their city off from affluent Palo Alto, then march for several hours to a property owned by Mark Zuckerberg and on to Facebook’s world headquarters at 1 Hacker Way. There, they demand that the company rescind its deal with the local police and instead provide better working conditions and benefits for its precariously employed and subcontracted workforce. The connections between the two causes are obvious to everyone here. “Janitors for Black Lives Matter,” one sign reads. Or “No Justice, No Peace, No Facebook Police.”
Outsourced Service Workers, Unite!
Before the pandemic, traffic around the global headquarters here usually backed up for kilometers, spilling into the residential neighborhoods of East Palo Alto. This is a sign of just how much the influx of highly paid tech workers is overburdening the local infrastructure. While residents of East Palo Alto sit day in and day out in the exhaust fumes of gridlocked traffic, Facebook employees, on the other hand, work comfortably in Wi-Fi-equipped shuttle buses behind tinted windows. Pre-pandemic, Facebook alone transported around 6,000 employees daily in company-owned buses. A two-tier system that has become deeply entrenched in the local landscape and further exacerbates existing segregation and social inequalities.
This is now also evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside Twitter and Square, Facebook is among the major tech companies that have already announced that many of their highly paid employees can now work from home permanently. Is the dystopia of a completely overburdened local infrastructure seamlessly transitioning into the dystopia of a hyper-monitored home office? Facebook is currently testing such monitoring tools on its own workforce. Precariously outsourced workers from East Palo Alto, on the other hand, are the first to lose not only their jobs but also their livelihoods due to the closure of company cafeterias and the reduction of other essential on-site services.
The company, however, intends to maintain a presence here in the future. Whether the originally planned expansion to 35,000 employees at its world headquarters – more than the population of Menlo Park! – will actually be implemented remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: Facebook’s power is not limited to virtual networks. It is also based on the appropriation of urban space and local infrastructure, and the exacerbation of existing social inequalities in the vicinity of its – after all – quite conventional physical office complexes.
Without the labor of the people in this ‘underdog’ version of the company town, however, nothing here would function at all. Like a house of cards, the Facebook empire would collapse without the unpaid digital labor of millions of users worldwide. And without the systemically vital work of maintenance, care, and repair provided by those who are routinely targeted by the police and who know the lavish playgrounds of tech headquarters only as service providers. The glossy version of the planned ‘Facebook Village’ is an illusion, because it suggests that this reality can simply be airbrushed away.
Editor’s note: In Part I of this two-part essay, which appeared last week in the Berliner Gazette, Katja Schwaller shed light on the context for the labor struggles described here: the gig economy and the COVID-19 pandemic. This article is based on the author’s presentation at the Silent Works conference, which is available on Vimeo as an English-language video talk: https://vimeo.com/480410376