This story was originally published by InsideSources.
It is an industry known as an overwhelmingly white, male bastion — one that has been slow to hire African-Americans, Hispanics and women. It is also an industry that has pushed policies in Washington that some major labor leaders have warned will stifle job growth. And it is an industry that has been accused of labor practices that undercut workers.
In short, Silicon Valley, long celebrated as forward-thinking, is increasingly seen – particularly by bedrock Democratic constituencies – as turning back the clock on some issues.
Yet despite all this, the Democratic Party establishment in Washington, starting with President Obama’s administration, has established an unusually close relationship with the sector’s rich and powerful companies — one that has benefited the two sides immensely, both in financial and political terms.
The ties between top Democrats and the high-tech industry are unmistakable, with the industry pumping millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of Democrats, at the same time that a revolving door brings major industry players into key positions within the Obama administration — and vice versa.
Larry Cohen, the former president of the Communications Workers of America, sharply questioned whether some Democrats are losing their way ideologically as they attempt to foster a close relationship with an industry that has in ways undermined core Democratic constituencies like labor.
“Whether you’re talking about Obama or Hillary or people in Congress or if you look at all the White House people who went to work at tech companies, whether Uber or Amazon, this notion that some Democrats can get unlimited amounts of money from these companies and still proclaim that they support workers, people have had it with that,” he said.
For Democrats, the tech giants of Silicon Valley have become virtual ATMs of campaign cash. In the 2012 elections, Google, Facebook and other Internet companies and their executives tilted heavily toward the Democrats, giving them 73 percent of their donations, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Over the last two years, the tech industry has paid Hillary Clinton $3.2 million in speaking fees — she has appeared, among other places, at eBay, Qualcomm and Salesforce.com. And as her poll numbers were slipping, Clinton headed to Silicon Valley and San Francisco on Sept. 28 for a fundraising pick-me-up — one event cost $2,700 a ticket.
As for President Obama, he started courting Silicon Valley while still a senator and mined its deep pockets repeatedly in 2008 and 2012, with Google executives and employees giving $800,000 to his re-election campaign. And now Obama is again looking to Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists, this time to help finance his presidential library.
The ties between Silicon Valley and top Democrats go far beyond campaign donations.
More than a dozen former Obama administration officials and aides have flocked to tech industry jobs. The most prominent examples are former White House press secretary Jay Carney, who has become Amazon’s head of global corporate affairs, and David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager and then a White House senior adviser, who has joined Uber as its senior vice president for strategy.
In turn, Obama has tapped a number of Google executives to serve in his administration, including Megan Smith, whom he appointed to be the nation’s technology czar. And earlier this year, the president even created a new position — chief data scientist and deputy chief technology officer for data policy — for D.J. Patil, Facebook’s former engineering director and a veteran of LinkedIn, eBay and Skype.
Many Democrats are not thrilled by this cozy relationship between their party and the tech industry. Some bedrock Democrats — most notably organized labor and some staunch liberals — are concerned that Obama and other Democratic Party leaders have come to rely so heavily on the largesse of this single industry. They say the Obama Administration has largely turned a blind eye to an industry that has been criticized as hostile to unions and unfriendly to workers on a number of fronts.
In fact, on the labor front, Silicon Valley has mostly managed to avoid the political pressure from Democrats that has, for example, been directed at the telecommunications industry, where companies tend to “create and maintain far more, and typically better-paying, jobs than the application and content sectors, particularly for people of color,” as the Communication Workers of America and the NAACP put it in a filing with th
