Google CEO stresses 'this is a business' after in-office protesters fired
Google CEO Sundar Pichai made it clear that disrupting the company's offices to make political statements would not be tolerated after anti-Israel protesters staged sit-ins last week.
The arrest and subsequent termination of more than two dozen Google employees involved in protests held at the tech giant's offices last week prompted CEO Sundar Pichai to address the matter with the workers who remained on the payroll.
Google fired 28 workers after anti-Israel protests took over its corporate offices in New York, Seattle and Sunnyvale, California, on April 16 in 10-hour sit-ins where demonstrators "took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers," according to an internal memo from Chris Rackow, Google vice president of global security.
The next day, Pichai reiterated in a blog post that such behavior would not be tolerated.
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"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," Pichai wrote. "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."
Demonstrators were arrested after they occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurianto to read their list of demands, including that Google cut off all ties to Israel and cancel a contract to provide cloud-computing and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli government.
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The employees also demanded that the company stop "the harassment, intimidation, bullying, silencing, and censorship of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Googlers."
Tech workers at both Amazon and Google have long protested Project Nimbus, which is Google and Amazon’s $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and military.
The tech workers, who organized the group "No Tech for Apartheid," said the Israeli miliary will use Google technology for "genocidal means."
Google has denied that its Nimbus project is assisting Israel with weapons or intelligence services, and demonstrators conceded that there was no proof that Project Nimbus was being used against the civilian population in Gaza.
A Google spokesperson told FOX Business in an email Tuesday that following the April 16 incidents, the company continued its investigation, "looking at additional details provided by coworkers who were physically disrupted, as well as those employees who took longer to identify because their identity was partly concealed – like by wearing a mask without their badge – while engaged in the disruption."
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"Our investigation into these events is now concluded, and we have terminated the employment of additional employees who were found to have been directly involved in disruptive activity," the spokesperson continued. "To reiterate, every single one of those whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings. We carefully confirmed and reconfirmed this."
FOX Business' Chris Pandolfo and Sarah Rumpf-Whitten contributed to this report.