Shannon Thaler
Fri, April 19, 2024
Google CEO Sundar Pichai laid down the law to his global workforce after firing 28 workers who stormed company offices to protest the Big Tech giant’s ties to Israel.
In a heated 1,200-word memo, Pichai wrote Google “is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.”
“This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted,” he added in the memo sent late Thursday.
Pichai broke his silence two days after workers staged 10-hour sit-ins at the search giant’s offices in New York, Seatte and Sunnyvale, Calif., to attack Google’s $1.2 billion “Project Nimbus” contract with the Israel’s government as part of a “No Tech for Genocide Day of Action.”
Nine workers were arrested before Google ended up axing 28 staffers.
“When we come to work, our goal is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Pichai said in his memo.
“That supersedes everything else and I expect us to act with a focus that reflects that.”
Representatives for Google did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Pichai’s message followed a missive sent by Google’s vice president of global security Chris Rackow, who called out the pro-Palestinian staffers after they occupied the Sunnyvale office of the company’s top Cloud executive.
A large group of Google employees held signs protesting their company’s participation in “Project Nimbus” while protesting at the search engine giant’s offices on Tuesday. The 28 staffers involved were terminated the following day. X/@NoTechApartheid
“They took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers,” Rackow wrote. “Their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made co-workers feel threatened.”
In New York, workers took over the 10th floor of Google’s offices in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, while other protesters swarmed the company’s offices in Seattle
“Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it,” Rackow wrote. “It clearly violates multiple policies that all employees must adhere to — including our code of conduct and policy on harassment, discrimination, retaliation, standards of conduct, and workplace concerns.”
Some of the protestors at Google wore traditional Arab headscarves as they stormed and occupied the office of a top executive in California. X/@NoTechApartheid
The fired staffers were affiliated No Tech For Apartheid, which has been critical of Google’s response to the Israel-Hamas war and $1.2 billion “Project Nimbus” contract — in which Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services provide cloud-computing and artificial intelligence services for the Israeli government and military.
The group had posted several videos and livestreams of the protests on its X account — including the exact moment that employees were issued final warnings and arrested by local police for trespassing.
Google rival Meta — the parent of social media giants Facebook and Instagram — has similar policies at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, where it tells staffers they cannot discuss issues including “health matters such as vaccine efficacy and abortion, legal matters such as pending legislation, political matters such as elections or political movements, and weapon ownership and rights.”
Workers took over the 10th floor of Google’s offices in Manhattan, while other protesters swarmed the company’s offices in Seattle. X/@NoTechApartheid
The initiative is part of Meta’s CEE, Community Engagement Expectations, which it implemented when it switched up its policies on internal communications in late 2022.
Google staff ordered to leave politics at home after anti-Israel protests
James Titcomb
TORY TELEGRAPH
Fri, April 19, 2024
Google sacked 28 employees following anti-Israel protests at its California office - X/Katejsim
Google’s chief executive has told staff to leave their politics at home in a rebuke to employees who have campaigned against its work with the Israeli government.
Sundar Pichai said that the office was not a place “to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics” amid fierce disagreements between its employees.
The edict marks a decisive shift from Google, which has long been seen as a beacon of a collegiate Silicon Valley culture encouraging political debate.
Google once told employees to “bring their whole selves to work” and supported widespread political discussions on its internal discussion boards.
But the policy has threatened to backfire in recent years as the company has been rocked by a string of employee protests over defence contracts and gender inequality.
Google workers staged a sit-in over the company's work with Israel - X/MPower_Change
On Wednesday Google sacked 28 staff who had staged a protest at the company’s offices objecting to its work for the Israeli government.
“[We] need to be more focused in how we work, collaborate, discuss and even disagree,” Mr Pichai wrote in an email to employees.
“We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That’s important to preserve. But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.
“This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted.
“When we come to work, our goal is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That supersedes everything else and I expect us to act with a focus that reflects that.”
On Tuesday, employees staged a sit in at the company’s Silicon Valley and New York offices, wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan “Googler against genocide” and occupying the office of Thomas Kurian, the head of its cloud computing division.
Nine were arrested after refusing to leave.
Google sells cloud computing and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli military as part of a $1.2bn (£1bn) programme called Project Nimbus. The company has said it merely provides “generally available cloud computing services” to the project.
Addressing the protests on Wednesday, Google’s head of security Chris Rackow said the protests were “unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made co-workers feel threatened”.
Google has gradually sought to crack down on fractious political debates in recent years. It recently made changes to its internal messaging tool to limit rows about the war in Gaza and discouraged political discussions during meetings.
It has come amid increasing protests over the company’s more controversial work, including an AI contract for the US military and a secret project to build a censored Chinese search engine, both of which have now been abandoned.
The company has also faced employee uprisings over how it treats women and over mass redundancies.
In 2017, it sacked an engineer after he circulated a memo arguing against Google’s efforts to close the gender gap.
Mr Pichai’s directive underlines a shift in Silicon Valley, where companies have often sought to foster a “mission driven culture”.
In 2020, the cryptocurrency company Coinbase said it would not allow discussions of politics and social issues at work, offering staff payoffs if they quit over the policy. The move was controversial at the time, with executives including Twitter’s then chief Jack Dorsey publicly criticising it and dozens of staff leaving.
Other tech giants including Facebook’s parent company Meta have sought to limit political discussions at work.
Google has recently faced criticism after its Gemini chatbot produced diverse images of Nazi soldiers and Vikings. Its founder Sergey Brin admitted that the chatbot “leans Left in many cases”.
Fri, April 19, 2024
Google sacked 28 employees following anti-Israel protests at its California office - X/Katejsim
Google’s chief executive has told staff to leave their politics at home in a rebuke to employees who have campaigned against its work with the Israeli government.
Sundar Pichai said that the office was not a place “to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics” amid fierce disagreements between its employees.
The edict marks a decisive shift from Google, which has long been seen as a beacon of a collegiate Silicon Valley culture encouraging political debate.
Google once told employees to “bring their whole selves to work” and supported widespread political discussions on its internal discussion boards.
But the policy has threatened to backfire in recent years as the company has been rocked by a string of employee protests over defence contracts and gender inequality.
Google workers staged a sit-in over the company's work with Israel - X/MPower_Change
On Wednesday Google sacked 28 staff who had staged a protest at the company’s offices objecting to its work for the Israeli government.
“[We] need to be more focused in how we work, collaborate, discuss and even disagree,” Mr Pichai wrote in an email to employees.
“We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That’s important to preserve. But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.
“This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted.
“When we come to work, our goal is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That supersedes everything else and I expect us to act with a focus that reflects that.”
On Tuesday, employees staged a sit in at the company’s Silicon Valley and New York offices, wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan “Googler against genocide” and occupying the office of Thomas Kurian, the head of its cloud computing division.
Nine were arrested after refusing to leave.
Google sells cloud computing and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli military as part of a $1.2bn (£1bn) programme called Project Nimbus. The company has said it merely provides “generally available cloud computing services” to the project.
Addressing the protests on Wednesday, Google’s head of security Chris Rackow said the protests were “unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made co-workers feel threatened”.
Google has gradually sought to crack down on fractious political debates in recent years. It recently made changes to its internal messaging tool to limit rows about the war in Gaza and discouraged political discussions during meetings.
It has come amid increasing protests over the company’s more controversial work, including an AI contract for the US military and a secret project to build a censored Chinese search engine, both of which have now been abandoned.
The company has also faced employee uprisings over how it treats women and over mass redundancies.
In 2017, it sacked an engineer after he circulated a memo arguing against Google’s efforts to close the gender gap.
Mr Pichai’s directive underlines a shift in Silicon Valley, where companies have often sought to foster a “mission driven culture”.
In 2020, the cryptocurrency company Coinbase said it would not allow discussions of politics and social issues at work, offering staff payoffs if they quit over the policy. The move was controversial at the time, with executives including Twitter’s then chief Jack Dorsey publicly criticising it and dozens of staff leaving.
Other tech giants including Facebook’s parent company Meta have sought to limit political discussions at work.
Google has recently faced criticism after its Gemini chatbot produced diverse images of Nazi soldiers and Vikings. Its founder Sergey Brin admitted that the chatbot “leans Left in many cases”.
Company Bosses Draw a Red Line on Office Activists
Business leaders are sending a warning to staff: Dissent that disrupts the workplace won’t be tolerated.
Vanessa Fuhrmans, Miles Kruppa and Lauren Weber
Sun, Apr 21, 2024
An Israeli cloud-computing contract that Google shares with Amazon drew protesters outside Google’s New York office this month.
- Cristina Matuozzi/Sipa USA/Associated Press
Business leaders are sending a warning to staff: Dissent that disrupts the workplace won’t be tolerated.
Google’s decision to fire 28 workers involved in sit-in protests against the tech giant’s cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government is the most recent and starkest example of companies’ stricter stance. Rifts with employees have spilled into public view at National Public Radio, the New York Times and other workplaces. Bosses are losing patience with staff eager to be the conscience of their companies, especially as employees pressure them on charged issues such as politics and the war in Gaza, executives, board members and C-suite advisers say.
The moves are a correction to the last several years, when corporate leaders often brooked dissent and encouraged staff to voice their personal convictions. On issues such as immigration policy and racial justice, many chief executives publicly expressed corporate solidarity. Google, in particular, has long prided itself on an open work culture that fostered internal debate, much like a college campus.
It is an open question as to what rights workers really have to speak out on the job. “None of this is settled,” said Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
Workers in the private sector aren’t protected by the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech, and “there is still a lot of uncertainty about how much free expression by workers is consistent with the operations of the workplace,” she said.
Numerous workers reported being fired from companies after writing contentious social-media posts about the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel or the war in Gaza. At Google, leaders said the protesting workers violated company policy by taking over office spaces and disrupting work. While preserving the company’s open culture is important, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote to staff afterward, “we also need to be more focused in how we work, collaborate, discuss and even disagree.”
An unexpected firing
Hasan Ibraheem, a Google software engineer who was arrested and then fired after taking part in the protest at the company’s New York office, said the firings didn’t square with his image of Google when he was hired less than two years ago.
It was “the big company that was still fun and vibrant. You were allowed to express yourself,” said Ibraheem, 23, who had been active in pro-Palestinian demonstrations before joining Google.
Though he knew of a few co-workers who had quit because of their opposition to the $1.2 billion Israeli contract that Google shares with Amazon, called Project Nimbus, he said he opted to stay so he could protest the contract from within.
Google had been responsive to employee concerns about government work before. In 2018, it decided not to renew a separate Pentagon contract after that work became the subject of intense internal debate. The company also pledged not to make artificial-intelligence technology for military weapons and adopted a set of AI principles to guide its work.
“I wasn’t expecting that my labor would be going toward aiding a genocide, and that if I spoke up against that I would be instantly fired,” Ibraheem said. Google said that, unlike the contract it canceled in 2018, the Project Nimbus contract isn’t aimed at being used for weapons or intelligence work. Some employees say they are worried the company is still aiding Israel’s war efforts.
Demonstrators gathered outside a Starbucks in Berlin earlier this year to protest Israel’s military actions in Gaza. - Michael Kuenne/PRESSCOV/ZUMA Press
Google’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, told employees last week that the activists’ behavior “made co-workers feel threatened.” A Google spokesman said numerous staffers complained the protesters disrupted their work.
Other companies have found themselves in clashes with dissenting employees. This month, NPR suspended a senior editor—who subsequently resigned—after he published a critique of the radio network’s news coverage in another media outlet. The New York Times, where divisions over its Gaza war coverage have roiled the newsroom, investigated whether staffers leaked confidential materials to another publication. It closed the probe last week without any conclusive finding.
Starbucks sued the union representing around 410 of its more than 9,700 U.S. stores after local affiliates of Starbucks Workers United posted pro-Palestinian tweets and reshared an image of a bulldozer breaking through the fence encircling Gaza. The coffee chain alleged the union’s use of the Starbucks name and branding led people to misattribute such sentiment to the company. (The two sides have since said they are working toward resolving the litigation.)
Shifting pressures
Until recently, many company leaders viewed speaking out as less risky than appearing unresponsive to calls for social action—such as in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, when businesses voiced support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
But issues that have boiled over in workplaces since then—from state abortion bans to the war in Gaza—don’t lend themselves to simple pronouncements of solidarity or town halls where employees can share their personal experiences.
The perils of being ensnared in partisan politics is changing the calculus of how responsive companies should be to any issue that doesn’t directly affect business, some executives and corporate advisers say.
Many of them point to Disney’s now-resolved legal battle with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a cautionary tale. The fight stemmed from Disney’s move in 2022 to publicly oppose Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, as it faced pressure from LGBTQ employees and advocacy groups. Last year’s damaging boycott of Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Bud Light—after the brand’s marketing promotion with a transgender influencer—has also made companies leery of moves that risk landing them in a culture war, they say.
Corporate leaders “are very concerned about public backlash, especially boards of directors,” said Jonathan Bernstein, founder and chairman of Bernstein Crisis Management, which advises companies on corporate communications and reputation management.
Ignoring workplace dissent isn’t an option either, he said. Several clients, he said, are wrestling with squabbling staff on email and Slack over issues ranging from the war in Gaza to U.S. politics.
Marissa Andrada, former chief people officer at Chipotle Mexican Grill and now a board director at Krispy Kreme, said she was surprised how swiftly Google moved to fire the protesting workers. In those situations, she said, “it is often better to take a pause, make sure all the facts are understood.”
Andrada recalls the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade, when she was still at Chipotle. Among staff, there were varying views on the ruling, and “employees were asking what we stood for,” she said.
Chipotle’s health plan covered travel costs in other instances where workers’ medical treatment required out-of-state care. It would therefore do the same, if necessary, for family planning and abortion care, Chipotle said in a memo to its women’s employee resource group, which had raised the question.
“We didn’t make up a new rule or put out a public statement,” she said. “We looked at what was consistent with our existing policy and values.”
No way to avoid offense
Acting on employee demands risks offending workers with opposing views. Lisa Marshall, a housing attorney with a nonprofit law firm, woke up one day this year to discover that her union had passed a resolution condemning Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
Lisa Marshall found herself at odds with her union’s position on the war in Gaza. - Benjamin Marshall
Marshall, an Orthodox Jew, said she saw the resolution as a direct affront to her Jewish identity.
Leaving the union wasn’t an option in Massachusetts, where she works and lives. So she filed a request to the UAW, the parent of Marshall’s union, to be a religious objector, which allows her to withhold her union dues and pay them to a nonprofit instead. She now routes her dues to the Brandeis Center, a Jewish civil rights group that advised her during this process. Her union didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Marshall said she appreciates the union’s role in fighting for pay, job security, retirement plans and benefits, but believes the resolution was an overstep, and painful for Jewish members.
Google’s CEO made a similar point in explaining why the company had quickly fired its protesting employees.
“This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform.” Pichai said in his email to staff.
“This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted,” he added.
Write to Vanessa Fuhrmans at Vanessa.Fuhrmans@wsj.com, Miles Kruppa at miles.kruppa@wsj.com and Lauren Weber at Lauren.Weber@wsj.com
Business leaders are sending a warning to staff: Dissent that disrupts the workplace won’t be tolerated.
Google’s decision to fire 28 workers involved in sit-in protests against the tech giant’s cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government is the most recent and starkest example of companies’ stricter stance. Rifts with employees have spilled into public view at National Public Radio, the New York Times and other workplaces. Bosses are losing patience with staff eager to be the conscience of their companies, especially as employees pressure them on charged issues such as politics and the war in Gaza, executives, board members and C-suite advisers say.
The moves are a correction to the last several years, when corporate leaders often brooked dissent and encouraged staff to voice their personal convictions. On issues such as immigration policy and racial justice, many chief executives publicly expressed corporate solidarity. Google, in particular, has long prided itself on an open work culture that fostered internal debate, much like a college campus.
It is an open question as to what rights workers really have to speak out on the job. “None of this is settled,” said Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
Workers in the private sector aren’t protected by the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech, and “there is still a lot of uncertainty about how much free expression by workers is consistent with the operations of the workplace,” she said.
Numerous workers reported being fired from companies after writing contentious social-media posts about the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel or the war in Gaza. At Google, leaders said the protesting workers violated company policy by taking over office spaces and disrupting work. While preserving the company’s open culture is important, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote to staff afterward, “we also need to be more focused in how we work, collaborate, discuss and even disagree.”
An unexpected firing
Hasan Ibraheem, a Google software engineer who was arrested and then fired after taking part in the protest at the company’s New York office, said the firings didn’t square with his image of Google when he was hired less than two years ago.
It was “the big company that was still fun and vibrant. You were allowed to express yourself,” said Ibraheem, 23, who had been active in pro-Palestinian demonstrations before joining Google.
Though he knew of a few co-workers who had quit because of their opposition to the $1.2 billion Israeli contract that Google shares with Amazon, called Project Nimbus, he said he opted to stay so he could protest the contract from within.
Google had been responsive to employee concerns about government work before. In 2018, it decided not to renew a separate Pentagon contract after that work became the subject of intense internal debate. The company also pledged not to make artificial-intelligence technology for military weapons and adopted a set of AI principles to guide its work.
“I wasn’t expecting that my labor would be going toward aiding a genocide, and that if I spoke up against that I would be instantly fired,” Ibraheem said. Google said that, unlike the contract it canceled in 2018, the Project Nimbus contract isn’t aimed at being used for weapons or intelligence work. Some employees say they are worried the company is still aiding Israel’s war efforts.
Demonstrators gathered outside a Starbucks in Berlin earlier this year to protest Israel’s military actions in Gaza. - Michael Kuenne/PRESSCOV/ZUMA Press
Google’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, told employees last week that the activists’ behavior “made co-workers feel threatened.” A Google spokesman said numerous staffers complained the protesters disrupted their work.
Other companies have found themselves in clashes with dissenting employees. This month, NPR suspended a senior editor—who subsequently resigned—after he published a critique of the radio network’s news coverage in another media outlet. The New York Times, where divisions over its Gaza war coverage have roiled the newsroom, investigated whether staffers leaked confidential materials to another publication. It closed the probe last week without any conclusive finding.
Starbucks sued the union representing around 410 of its more than 9,700 U.S. stores after local affiliates of Starbucks Workers United posted pro-Palestinian tweets and reshared an image of a bulldozer breaking through the fence encircling Gaza. The coffee chain alleged the union’s use of the Starbucks name and branding led people to misattribute such sentiment to the company. (The two sides have since said they are working toward resolving the litigation.)
Shifting pressures
Until recently, many company leaders viewed speaking out as less risky than appearing unresponsive to calls for social action—such as in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, when businesses voiced support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
But issues that have boiled over in workplaces since then—from state abortion bans to the war in Gaza—don’t lend themselves to simple pronouncements of solidarity or town halls where employees can share their personal experiences.
The perils of being ensnared in partisan politics is changing the calculus of how responsive companies should be to any issue that doesn’t directly affect business, some executives and corporate advisers say.
Many of them point to Disney’s now-resolved legal battle with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a cautionary tale. The fight stemmed from Disney’s move in 2022 to publicly oppose Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, as it faced pressure from LGBTQ employees and advocacy groups. Last year’s damaging boycott of Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Bud Light—after the brand’s marketing promotion with a transgender influencer—has also made companies leery of moves that risk landing them in a culture war, they say.
Corporate leaders “are very concerned about public backlash, especially boards of directors,” said Jonathan Bernstein, founder and chairman of Bernstein Crisis Management, which advises companies on corporate communications and reputation management.
Ignoring workplace dissent isn’t an option either, he said. Several clients, he said, are wrestling with squabbling staff on email and Slack over issues ranging from the war in Gaza to U.S. politics.
Marissa Andrada, former chief people officer at Chipotle Mexican Grill and now a board director at Krispy Kreme, said she was surprised how swiftly Google moved to fire the protesting workers. In those situations, she said, “it is often better to take a pause, make sure all the facts are understood.”
Andrada recalls the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade, when she was still at Chipotle. Among staff, there were varying views on the ruling, and “employees were asking what we stood for,” she said.
Chipotle’s health plan covered travel costs in other instances where workers’ medical treatment required out-of-state care. It would therefore do the same, if necessary, for family planning and abortion care, Chipotle said in a memo to its women’s employee resource group, which had raised the question.
“We didn’t make up a new rule or put out a public statement,” she said. “We looked at what was consistent with our existing policy and values.”
No way to avoid offense
Acting on employee demands risks offending workers with opposing views. Lisa Marshall, a housing attorney with a nonprofit law firm, woke up one day this year to discover that her union had passed a resolution condemning Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
Lisa Marshall found herself at odds with her union’s position on the war in Gaza. - Benjamin Marshall
Marshall, an Orthodox Jew, said she saw the resolution as a direct affront to her Jewish identity.
Leaving the union wasn’t an option in Massachusetts, where she works and lives. So she filed a request to the UAW, the parent of Marshall’s union, to be a religious objector, which allows her to withhold her union dues and pay them to a nonprofit instead. She now routes her dues to the Brandeis Center, a Jewish civil rights group that advised her during this process. Her union didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Marshall said she appreciates the union’s role in fighting for pay, job security, retirement plans and benefits, but believes the resolution was an overstep, and painful for Jewish members.
Google’s CEO made a similar point in explaining why the company had quickly fired its protesting employees.
“This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform.” Pichai said in his email to staff.
“This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted,” he added.
Write to Vanessa Fuhrmans at Vanessa.Fuhrmans@wsj.com, Miles Kruppa at miles.kruppa@wsj.com and Lauren Weber at Lauren.Weber@wsj.com
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