"(T)o say that the individual is culturally constituted has become a truism. . . . We assume, almost without question, that a self belongs to a specific cultural world much as it speaks a native language." James Clifford

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Google’s Philanthropy: $1 Billion to Tech-Train America’s Unemployed

In October 2017, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, announced that the company would give $1 billion over the next five years to nonprofit organizations that help people “adjust to the changing nature of work.”[1] The digital skills philanthropic venture would essentially help otherwise unemployed Americans get jobs that require high-tech skills. This would also enable more people to use the internet, and thus the company’s products. So a reporter at USA Today can be said to gild the lily a bit in claiming that the initiative “is a tacit acknowledgement from one of the world’s most valuable companies that it bears some responsibility for rapid advances in technology that are radically reshaping industries and eliminating jobs in the U.S. and around the world.”[2] I submit that it is highly unlikely that such an acknowledgement ever took place at Google, given the more likely scenario wherein the company’s management saw an opportunity to enlarge (and hopefully enrich) its labor pool and customer base.
In making the announcement from Pittsburgh, Pichai observed, “One-third of jobs in 2020 will require skills that aren’t common [in 2017]. It’s a big problem.”[3] Indeed. He may in fact have been understating it. Giving $10 million to Goodwill’s Digital Career Accelerator so it could “provide 1 million people with access to digital skills and career opportunities” does not necessarily mean that 1 million people would become proficient at such skills, which after all are not easy to master. There is also the matter of attitude, which can function as a wedge between digital skills and realized and sustained career opportunities. Chronic unemployment itself can test and even twist a person’s attitude, which can also be a factor in a person’s unemployment in the first place.
Generally speaking, funneling a society’s extant labor force and the unemployed through a skills-filter, in this case, digital skills, ignores the innate diversity that exists within any societal labor pool (and society itself). The heterogeneous nature of people vocationally is happily in line with the fact that a diversified economy is more stable than one that privileges a certain sector or even its skill-set.



[1] Jessica Lynn, “Google to Give $1 Billion to Nonprofits and Help Americans Get Jobs in the New Economy,” The New York Times, October 12, 2017.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.