Google workers to protest how sexual misconduct claims are handled by company
Google employees are planning a walkout this week to protest the way the company has handled sexual misconduct allegations, BuzzFeed News reported Tuesday.
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Around 200 of the search giant’s engineers are expected to participate in the protest this Thursday, BuzzFeed reported, citing four people familiar with the situation.
Google did not immediately return FOX Business’ request for comment.
The planned protests follow a report from The New York Times last week that the company protected multiple executives accused of sexual misconduct – including Andy Rubin who created the Android software. Rubin left the company in 2014 with a $90 million pay package despite “credible” evidence he had coerced an employee into performing a sexual act.
After the Times report was released, Google employees turned to an internal forum to discuss their frustrations over how Google had handled the situations, according to BuzzFeed.
“I feel like there’s a pattern of powerful men getting away with awful behavior towards women at Google‚ or if they don’t get away with it, they get a slap on the wrist, or they get sent away with a golden parachute … And it’s a leadership of mostly men making the decisions about what kind of consequences to give, or not give,” one anonymous Google employee told BuzzFeed News.
In response to the Times’ report CEO Sundar Pichai sent an email to employees saying the company had fired 48 employees for sexual harassment over the past two years – none of whom received an exit package.
But employees’ frustrations with the management team at Google have been mounting throughout recent months. Earlier this year, workers penned a letter to Pichai protesting involvement in a Pentagon pilot program called Project Maven – an artificial intelligence program designed to use data captured by government drones to identify and track objects viewed on surveillance footage. Google workers were concerned about how the application could be weaponized once under ownership of the U.S. military.
Similar concerns are believed to be part of the reason Google dropped its bid for a multi-billion cloud contract with the Pentagon.