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Irish Times

‘The mask is off in tech. You're getting fired if you speak out'

William Fitzgerald has a lot on his mind. It's on the button of 2pm in Dublin when the WhatsApp call notification appears, making it barely 6am where he is, on the Pacific coast of the United States . What's it like in that part of the world? 'That's a big question,' the Waterford -born founder of The Worker Agency says, answering what was meant to be a light starter question about the weather. 'It's kind of surreal. I lived in Hong Kong when the students [in 2012] protested against the curriculum being changed. I was working for Google at the time, and I attended some of the protests, but I wasn't involved [directly]. Now I'm kind of directly involved in trying to stop what Trump is doing with the support of corporate America.' READ MORE The Irishman isn't exaggerating his current situation. Fitzgerald founded The Worker Agency in 2018. This was shortly after he did the unthinkable for many people in his position: abandoning a 10-year climb up the corporate career ladder in Google and quitting his job in the tech giant's public policy unit. The idea for The Worker Agency, which he describes as an advocacy firm, was born out of Fitzgerald's convictions and the work he did with Google that put him into the orbit of activists around the globe. Providing public relations services to campaign groups and trade unions in the US, the agency began as a one-man operation but now employs 10 people at its offices in Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area. 'We help people design their strategies,' Fitzgerald explains, 'and then we help them execute on the tactics, whether that's helping pitch stories, helping to do the social media.' His clients have included everything from racial justice campaigns to workers trying to form a union within Google parent Alphabet , as well as the likes of Radices, a Texas-based non-profit promoting migrant rights. [ Why Donald Trump is only beginning his pursuit of the 'enemy within' Opens in new window ] In the immediate aftermath of Trump's election victory last November, Fitzgerald sat down with The Irish Times for a brief interview on the fringes of the Web Summit in Lisbon. 'Tech is really in bed with the bad stuff,' he said at the time, whether that's defence contracts or surveillance on behalf of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). He warned that the next few years could be great for big tech but bleak for almost everyone else if Trump's policies matched his increasingly authoritarian rhetoric. I think actually the formative part of my youth was my mum basically saying: 'Go out and live your best life and do whatever the f*** you want' Some seven months later, it seemed like a good time to sit down with him again, given what has happened in the interim. Whether it's the deployment of the California National Guard to quell protests in Los Angeles, the deportation of people to a prison in El Salvador or the litany of other developments in American public life, the Trump administration's ability to execute its plans has surpassed the expectations of many of its most vocal critics. 'Since I moved to America,' Fitzgerald says, 'it has operated, for better or for worse, as a place where anyone could just say whatever the heck they wanted. It feels to me now like they're trying to turn America into a place like Singapore or somewhere, where, literally, that just doesn't happen any more. Now, I don't know if they're going to be able to do it, but they're definitely trying.' Even in the face of these outrages, the slavishness of the tech barons – not just Elon Musk – to the administration has been notable. It's also novel, given Silicon Valley's previous outwardly liberal gloss that at least ticked the necessary cultural boxes. What changed? 'They stopped pretending,' Fitzgerald says. 'The mask is off. You're getting fired if you speak out. Back in the day, [tech employees] used to be even asking questions [of their employer] in the comments on company chat boards.' In 2025, however, avenues for dissent have been barricaded up and a 'culture of fear' is very much in effect, he says. That sense of precarity has at least something to do with the massive rounds of lay-offs big tech embarked upon a couple of years ago, Fitzgerald explained in Lisbon last November. 'The software engineers making big money in Silicon Valley, they don't know if they're going to wake up tomorrow and they're gone. So, the culture within the companies has also changed.' Little surprise, then, that Fitzgerald says the last six months have been the busiest ever for his firm. 'I have back-to-back calls, meetings', he says, describing what a typical day looks like for him. 'Sometimes, I almost have to do what you do as a reporter, meeting sources, meeting people in tech companies, trying to build relationships.' Berkeley, where Fitzgerald lives with his wife and daughter, has a special place in the history of American dissent. The birthplace of the US Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s, the city was a hotbed of activism during the period of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. That heritage remains a strong part of the culture there. 'A lot of our neighbours came up during that era,' Fitzgerald says. 'There's a lot of people – some would call them boomers – of the older generation who are really annoyed, really sad but really determined […] They're trying to do everything they can to actually not let [Trump] do it.' [ Finn McRedmond: It's no wonder people my age are miserable. Everyone keeps telling them they're totally screwed Opens in new window ] That sense of outrage and the desire to resist is one of the reasons The Worker Agency has been so busy, according to Fitzgerald. 'I'm kind of impressed because people aren't just letting it happen. People are resolute.' 'Resolute' is also an adjective that fits Fitzgerald. His decision to leave Google two years into the first Trump administration was born, to some extent, out of his frustrations with the company. In previous media outings he has described his dismay at the search engine giant's initial unwillingness to make a strong statement about the 45th president's mooted 'Muslim ban'. Although it eventually came out against it, Fitzgerald, who was head of policy communications at the time, has said it was a key turning point in his relationship with the company. Fitzgerald was born in An Sean Phobal in the Gaeltacht area of Waterford. His father, a local insurance man, died when William was four. That left his mother to raise six children on her own. 'It was an interesting journey,' Fitzgerald says. 'In that my dad had done well by buying property in Dublin in the 1980s when it was tough to do that. So, he had put money aside.' That money allowed the six children to go to boarding school. Fitzgerald's sisters went to King's Hospital in Dublin while Fitzgerald went to Clongowes Wood College in Co Kildare. 'Each year, I was in school with the richest boys in Ireland but at home, there was literally nothing.' Surely this must have influenced his activist bent? Only to an extent, suggests Fitzgerald. 'I have five siblings and we're all 100 per cent different. Even at a young age, I was kind of wanting to volunteer and stuff, so I think your surroundings are one part of it.' More important in those years was his mother's parenting style, he says. 'I think actually the formative part of my youth was my mum basically saying: 'Go out and live your best life and do whatever the f*** you want'. Like, we were getting arrested as teenagers and the police were trying to tell her we were juvenile delinquents. She was shouting at the police: 'How dare you!'' But 'no matter what', Fitzgerald says, 'she supported us and loved us' and let her six children find their own light. His siblings have gone on to do 'incredible things', he says, not least his brother Richard, who founded Augustus Media, the brand behind Lovin Dubai and other lifestyle websites in the Middle East. Fitzgerald's work with Google, which he joined while completing a business and politics degree in Trinity College Dublin, brought him around the globe and helped shape his worldview. 'One of the first jobs I had,' he recalls, 'was flying around Asia giving out two-factor security keys to activists. I met my wife. She was one of the free speech activists in Pakistan. It was a place that kind of encouraged me to live and breathe my values in a real way.' The job eventually took him to California, where he says he involved himself in 'Black Lives Matter stuff' and other campaigns. 'My evenings were spent during those 10 years at Google kind of providing free communications services to organisations,' he says. Starting The Worker Agency, the first task was to find some of those groups 'that might be willing to pay for this as a service'. On this side of the pond, the public and political conversation about Trump and big tech has centred mostly on tariffs and the economic fallout. Fitzgerald is realistic about the reasons for that. 'Foreign direct investment is so important to Ireland,' he says, and the tax base's reliance on just a handful of American multinationals is always going to create a cautious atmosphere in Government when it comes to talking about tech. 'I remember when I was at Google, the joke was: 'Oh, if we just sneeze, Enda Kenny will run down.' I do understand how difficult it is.' But tech's Trump-ward turn is going to highlight some glaring contradictions in the Government's positions. One such tension is the Coalition's messaging on Israel and its war in Gaza , which Taoiseach Micheál Martin has described as genocide. Big tech's dealings with Israel and its military are increasingly being criticised and highlighted by current and former workers at the world's most powerful companies, such as Microsoft, where the No Azure for Apartheid campaign is looking to end the group's cloud and AI contracts with the Israeli military. Fitzgerald's former employer, Google, is facing similar pressure. Last December, the New York Times reported that lawyers at the tech giant had warned senior executives in 2021 that its cloud computing services deal with Israel, Project Nimbus, could be 'used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights abuses' in the West Bank . The Nimbus issue has been 'a lightning rod for arguments' inside Google since the start of the war in Gaza, the newspaper reported at the time. For its part, the company has denied that its technology is 'directed at highly sensitive, classified or military workloads'. 'It's going to get harder for the kind of Irish mainstream establishment to continue taking nice pictures with these tech executives,' says Fitzgerald. 'It's also things like immigration and the Irish [in the US]. We are impacted by that. I know there are Irish-Americans who are really struggling. I just think it will get harder [for Irish politicians] as you see more stuff happening. And it's still very early in the administration. We're not even a year in.' What the next three years bring is anyone's guess. For Fitzgerald's part, he wants to bring The Worker Agency to Ireland in some capacity. Last week, he incorporated a company called The Worker Agency Ireland Ltd with the Companies Registration Office . Can we expect to see the firm open a Dublin – or Waterford – office in the near future? 'I have a real ambition [to do that],' he says. 'I feel like there are things in Ireland and the European Union that we work on from afar that we'd be much better at if we had a physical presence in Ireland. But will we have a team of three in Dublin in six months? God, I'd love that. But I can't say for sure.' CV Age : 39 Family : Married to Sana, one child (Zaina) and another on the way Lives : Berkeley, California Something you might expect : 'Every year, I find myself both surprised and disappointed when Waterford fall short of winning the All-Ireland hurling final.' Something that might surprise : 'Most days I either swim or surf somewhere around the San Francisco Bay, convincing myself it's warmer than Clonea Beach back in Dungarvan, Co Waterford'