Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 157

to include company-provided exercise equipment. Workers are free to
come and go as they please, as long as they satisfy the requirements of
their work group. However, most remain at the ofice for an average of
nine hours a day because of all the perks. Here is an account of a Google
employee's description: “In the course of our brief conversation, she
mentioned subsidized massages (with massage rooms on nearly every
loor); free once-a-week eyebrow shaping; free yoga and Pilates classes; a
course she took called 'Unwind: The Art and Science of Stress Manage-
ment'; a course in advanced negotiation taught by a Wharton professor;
a health consultation and follow-up with a personal health counselor;
an author series and an appearance by the novelist Toni Morrison; and
a live interview of Justin Bieber by Jimmy Fallon in the Google ofice.”
The free food alone is enough for some to return to the ofice on their
day off. Practically every element in the workplace is research-tested and
appears to work, in the words of one Google executive, “to create the
happiest, most productive workplace in the world” (ibid.). Google turns
workplaces into communities, encouraging freedom and serendipitous
interactions that contribute to the innovations that make the company
a world leader. Most other companies that employ the tech aristocracy
fall short of Google's standard but only in degree. Big cloud companies
like SAS and Rackspace report similar degrees of comfort and freedom.
Nevertheless, the tech aristocracy is just a thin sliver, the privileged
few at the apex of companies that not only employ thousands of work-
ers at their corporate centers but also manage global supply chains. It is
critical to resist the temptation to mistake the sliver for the whole because
doing so means missing serious problems looming for the cloud comput-
ing industry at two very different levels of labor. The supply chain, or
the chain of accumulation, responsible for the success or failure of cloud
computing extends well beyond the corporate headquarters. In order to
understand the industry, especially its labor issues, it is essential to scan
the broader supply chain that includes, at one end, the workers who
manufacture the material that makes cloud computing possible, where
workplace conditions are comparable to the “dark satanic mills” of the
early industrial age, and at the other, the work of the IT professionals
who are most directly affected by the transformation in labor that cloud
computing is bringing about. The irst group of workers toils primarily
in the industrial centers of China where contractors for big computer