Part of me wanted to believe that I deserved what I got because I had worked hard, while others simply hadn’t. But looking at the mostly black or Hispanic red-badged employees, I couldn’t escape the possibility that there might be structural reasons for this divide, independent of individual work ethic; not everyone had the same opportunity to have their hard work fall neatly along a path of upward social mobility. These structural inequalities might not be Google’s fault, but Google clearly wasn’t reluctant to make use of them for the purpose of lowering labour costs.
