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Article

19 Nov 2019

Author:
Lauren Kaori Gurley, Motherboard

More than 200 employees at Tableau walked off the job to protest the data visualization company's ties with ICE

"Tech workers walked off the job after software they made was sold to ICE," 31 Oct 2019

After more than a year of organizing behind closed doors... [r]oughly 240 employees walked out of Tableau’s headquarters and protested in Seattle’s Gas Works Park, demanding the company stop its software from being sold to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)... [A] survey of public federal databases shows that third party vendors have sold millions of dollars of Tableau software to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the agency that houses ICE and CBP, in 2019 alone.

... In late June [2019], Tableau employees penned an internal letter that they presented to the company’s management, requesting the company cut ties with ICE and CBP... Nearly 20% of Tableau’s roughly U.S. workforce signed onto the resolution. In response, Tableau offered an enumerated proposal, which did not meet any of their specific demands... The walkout at Tableau follows employee-led protests at tech companies including MicrosoftGoogleAmazonSalesforce, and most recently Github and Chef... On September 23, Barry Crist, the CEO of Chef, announced that the software company would not renew its contracts with ICE and CBP when they expire in 2020, after a former employee deleted code in protest of the company’s work with ICE. 

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