Why workers’ right don’t matter in Silicon Valley | John Naughton

The leaders of the world's biggest technology companies are liberal on social issues and trade, but anti-union and anti-regulation

One of the stranger sights of June was watching the titans of Silicon Valley meekly obeying Trump's summons to a tech summit (dubbed his American Technology Council) at the White House. Those attending included Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Safra Catz of Oracle, Tim Cook of Apple, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins (the venture-capital firm), Brian Krzanich of Intel, Tom Leighton of Akamai, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Ginni Rometty of IBM, Eric Schmidt of Alphabet (Google's parent company) and Steve Mollenkopf of Qualcomm. The only tech leader who was invited but explicitly declined was Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and other ventures. (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg cited diary clashes as an explanation for his non-attendance.)

Some attendees looked pretty sheepish, as well they might. Many, if not most of them, abhor everything the president stands for. The meeting, as with many of Trump's other round-table assemblies, brought to mind footage of Saddam Hussein's cabinet in session. But while it was clear that many of those present would have preferred to have been elsewhere, they were also chary of being seen to snub a populist hero. So the aphrodisiac effect of power was much in evidence.

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