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By Jason Abbruzzese and Alex Holmes
Google employees in company offices around the world began staging a walkout on Thursday to protest the company’s handling of senior executives accused of badual misconduct.
The protest was scheduled by organizers to begin at 11:10 a.m. local time for each office, with a Twitter account set up by protest organizers already featuring walkout photos from a variety of locations including Singapore, Tokyo, London, Dublin and others.
The walkout was organized in response to a report by The New York Times published last week that found two senior Google executives had been paid tens of millions of dollars in exit packages after they left the company following allegations of badual misconduct.
A third senior executive named in the Times article had been allowed to stay at the company but resigned on Tuesday.
The report drew a swift response from Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive officer. That same day, Pichai and Eileen Naughton, the company’s vice president of people operations, sent an email to employees saying that the company was “dead serious” about making sure the company provides “a safe and inclusive workplace. Pichai and Naughton said that the company had fired 48 people without pay for badual misconduct over the past two years.
Pichai also supported the employees’ protest.
“Earlier this week, we let Googlers know that we are aware of the activities planned for today and that employees will have the support they need if they wish to participate,” Pichai said in an emailed statement. “Employees have raised constructive ideas for how we can improve our policies and our processes going forward. We are taking in all their feedback so we can turn these ideas into action.”
Pichai’s support did little to quell growing employee resentment.
“Hundreds of people are demanding structural change, not just inclusive sounding PR,” tweeted Meredith Whittaker on Tuesday, confirming that employees were planning a walkout.
The Times reported on Wednesday that protest organizers expected more than 1,500 employees to participate in the walkout.
A Twitter account, @GoogleWalkout, said that employees were demanding five changes: an end to forced arbitration on cases of harbadment and discrimination, a commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity, a publicly disclosed badual harbadment transparency report; a new process for reporting badual misconduct, and to elevate the company’s chief diversity officer to report to the company’s CEO and have them make recommendations to the company’s board of directors.
The group that organized the protest also called for an employee representative to be added to the company’s board.
In London, Google employees said on Twitter that weather forced employees to remain inside, but that people filled the biggest room in the office with more listening in overflow areas.
Marc Cohen, an employee in Google’s London office who participated in the walkout, said he was participating to send a message to the company’s leadership.
“I’m disappointed by some of the things I’ve been reading about and hearing about how complaints have been handled by Google, and I wanted to share my support for people who have to deal with those kind of situations and also as a sign for my own personal dissatisfaction for how Google has handled some of these situations in the past,” Cohen said.
Sam Dutton, who works in Google’s London office, said that the company had been supportive of the protest, which he hoped could inspire change within Google as well as other companies.
“I think there is a change in mood across the world in many different companies, and I hope this will have a positive effect,” Dutton said.
This is a developing story, check back for updates.
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