Google Workers Fume Over Executives’ Payouts After Sexual Misconduct Claims - 48 people fired, including 13 senior managers
Google Workers Fume Over Executives’ Payouts After Sexual
Misconduct Claims
By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Kate Conger, New York Times October
26, 2018 7:38 p.m.
SAN FRANCISCO — At Google’s weekly staff meeting
Thursday, the top question employees voted to ask Larry Page, a co-founder, and
Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, was one about sexual harassment.
“Multiple company actions strongly indicate that
protection of powerful abusers is literally and figuratively more valuable to
the company than the well-being of their victims,” read the question, which was
displayed at the meeting, according to people who attended. “What concrete and
meaningful actions will be taken to turn this around?”
The query was part of an outpouring from Google employees
after a New York Times article published Thursday reported how the company had
paid millions of dollars in exit packages to male executives accused of
misconduct and stayed silent about their transgressions. In the case of Andy
Rubin, creator of Android mobile software, the company gave him a $90 million
exit package even after Google had concluded that a misconduct claim against
him was credible.
While tech workers, executives and others slammed Google
for the revelations, nowhere was condemnation of the internet giant’s actions
more pointed than among its own employees.
The employee rebuke played out Thursday and Friday in
company meetings and on internal message boards and social networks, as well as
on Twitter. Jaana Dogan, who works in Google Cloud, the company’s cloud
computing business, tweeted, “if you are worth of millions of dollars, you
should be able to show the door to authoritarian governments and serial
abusers. If not now, then when?”
Another Google employee, Sanette Tanaka Sloan, also
posted on Twitter that the way Google had handled Rubin’s misconduct claim was
“crushing.” She added, “We can do so much better.”
On Memegen, an internal Google photo-messaging board
popular among employees for its humor, one of the top posts Thursday featured a
GIF of an overjoyed game show contestant showered with confetti. Beneath the
image was the text “got caught sexually harassing employee,” said one employee
who saw the post and who asked not to be identified because she was not
authorized to speak publicly.
Google’s workforce often takes to internal messaging
platforms to protest management decisions. Employees have opposed the company’s
decisions to work with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence technology and
to create a censored search engine for China. (Google has since dropped its AI
effort with the Pentagon and it has not introduced a censored search engine for
China.)
On Thursday and Friday, some Google employees said they
were dispirited by how some executives accused of harassment were paid millions
of dollars even as the company was fending off lawsuits from former employees
and the Labor Department that claimed it underpaid women. Google has said in
the past that it had found “no significant difference” in the pay between men
and women at the company.
Other employees said they tried to calculate how many
hours of their work would have gone toward generating the $90 million Rubin
obtained in his exit package. Rubin has denied any misconduct and said the
report of his compensation was a “wild exaggeration.”
Some Google employees said they had more questions after
Pichai and Eileen Naughton, vice president of people operations, wrote in an
email Thursday that the company had fired 48 people, including 13 senior
managers, for sexual harassment over the last two years and that none of them
received an exit package.
Some workers said they wanted more data on how many
claims were investigated and how many were found credible before the 48 people
were terminated, while others questioned the promotion and hiring system that
allowed 13 people to become senior managers who harassed in the first place.
Liz Fong-Jones, a Google engineer for more than a decade
and an activist on workplace issues, said in a tweet that judgments over
misconduct claims can be clouded by whether a person’s boss feels they can
“afford” to lose that person. In the case of Rubin and others, she said, that
put Page in the spotlight.
“The decision-maker must have been Larry Page,”
Fong-Jones wrote. “The buck stops there.”
At Google’s employee meeting Thursday, hours after
Alphabet, Google’s parent, reported another quarter of blockbuster earnings,
Page spoke to employees along with Pichai and Naughton. It was unclear how they
responded to the question from employees, but the executives struck a
conciliatory tone, according to remarks obtained by The Times.
During the meeting, Page and Pichai did not comment on
specific misconduct cases. Pichai noted that Google has made some “important
changes” in how it handles harassment cases, according to the remarks.
“We want to get better, and we want to get to a place
where it truly reflects our values of respect, particularly respect for each
other,” Pichai said.
Page said if employees suffered from harassment while at
Google, then the company was not “the company we aspire to be.”
He also offered an apology.
“I’ve had to make a lot of decisions that affect people
every day, some of them not easy. And, you know, I think certainly there’s ones
with the benefit of hindsight I would have made differently,” Page said. “I
know this is really an exceptionally painful story for some of you, and I’m
really sorry for that.”
Copyright 2018 New York Times News Service. All rights
reserved.
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