At Meta, more than 58,000 employees have a Blind account, or about two-thirds of the staff. Roughly 6,000 employees signed up within the last month. They check the app on average three times per day. Blind saw a similar uptick in sign-ups across companies during the wave of layoffs in April 2020.
Mr. Kim realizes that his platform makes some executives uncomfortable. They’re not accustomed to their employees having free rein to talk about salary, bonuses, leadership and layoffs. Other services like Slack give employers more power: They can limit replies on a channel, and match a comment to a worker’s identity. But Mr. Kim argues that Blind is valuable to executives, allowing them to see what their workers are upset about and respond before tensions heighten.
“It’s something that companies are not used to,” he said. “Company-sponsored channels like Slack, internal messengers, or emails — those are all the things that pretty much companies can control.”
There are many other growing initiatives that allow workers to expose employer misdeeds, on top of tweeting their way to more workplace transparency. Lioness, for example, is a firm that helps workers share stories of discrimination and inequity with the media, and has supported people at companies like SpaceX, Apple and Glossier. California enacted legislation this year prohibiting nondisclosure agreements that apply to illegal conduct, a law spearheaded by a former Pinterest employee who spoke out about workplace discrimination, including by posting on Twitter.
But in the last week, as Mr. Musk has taken control of Twitter and announced a slew of proposed updates to the business, some have wondered what changes will come for a platform that has represented transparency and worker power to so many.
Charlotte Newman, a senior manager at Amazon, found an unexpected depth of support from Twitter followers when she decided to sue her employer for racial and gender discrimination. She used the platform to share her experiences. She received messages of comfort and encouragement from friends, strangers, political leaders and other women who had battled discrimination at their own companies.
Sumber: www.nytimes.com
