Google CEO says office is no place to ‘discuss politics’ after firing 28 people over anti-Israel sit-in

technology

by Shannon Saylor

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the law to employees around the world after he fired 28 employees who stormed the company’s offices to protest the big tech company’s relationship with Israel. It was enacted.

In a heated 1,200-word memo, Pichai wrote that Google “is a business, and we do not allow people to interfere with colleagues, make them feel unsafe, try to use the company as a personal platform, or engage in conflict.” This is not the place for such acts.” About destructive issues and political debates. ”

“This is too important a time for us as a company to be distracted,” he added in a memo sent late Thursday.

Pichai said workers staged 10-hour sit-ins at the search giant’s offices in New York, Seat and Sunnyvale, Calif., to attack Google’s $1.2 billion “Project Nimbus” contract with the Israeli government. He broke his silence two days later. There is no technology in the days of genocidal action. ”

Nine employees were arrested before Google ultimately fired 28 employees.

“When we go to work, our goal is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and usable,” Pichai said in the memo.

“That takes precedence over everything else, and we expect our actions to be focused on reflecting that.”

A Google representative did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

Pichai’s message followed a letter sent by Chris Rakow, Google’s vice president of global security, in which he criticized pro-Palestinian staffers after they occupied the company’s cloud chief’s Sunnyvale office. .

“They took over office space, desecrated our property, and physically interfered with the work of other Googlers,” Rakow wrote. “Their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made colleagues feel threatened.”

In New York, employees occupied the 10th floor of Google’s offices in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, and other protesters flocked to Google’s offices in Seattle.

“This kind of behavior has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it,” Rakow wrote. “This is a clear violation of multiple policies that all employees must abide by, including our Code of Conduct and Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, Retaliation, Standards of Conduct, and Workplace Concerns.”

The fired staffers have been critical of Google’s response to the Israel-Hamas war and the $1.2 billion “Project Nimbus” deal between Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services to provide cloud computing and artificial intelligence services. -Belonged to For Apartheid. Israeli government and military.

The group has posted several videos and livestreams of the protests to its X account, including the exact moment an employee was given a final warning and arrested by local police for trespassing. was.

Meta Inc., a rival to Google, the parent company of social media giants Facebook and Instagram, has a similar policy at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., in which employees are asked not to “receive information such as vaccine effectiveness or abortion. They are not allowed to discuss issues such as health issues or legal issues such as pregnancy. These include pending legislation, political issues such as elections and political campaigns, and weapon ownership and rights. ”

This initiative is part of Meta’s CEE, Community Engagement Expectations, and was introduced in late 2022 when we switched policies around internal communications.