Google CEO tells staffers the office is not a place to ‘debate politics’ after firing 28 for anti-Israel sit-ins
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.
“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.”
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.”
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.
