Google employees stage international treatment of sexual harassment

"We are thousands, at all levels of the company," says the letter. "And we have enough."

Employee activism increases in response to a New York Times article last week reporting the

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The unit has protected three senior executives over the last decade after they were charged with sexual misconduct, including one to whom it gave a $ 90 million exit package in 2014. Google declined to comment on the details of the Times' story.

Photos of the walkout flooded social media on Thursday, as Google employees filled the streets outside the offices from Mumbai to Dublin.

In New York, shortly after 11 am Thursday, many Google employees dropped glass doors at the company's office in lower Manhattan.

They gathered in nearby Hudson River Park and held placards carrying slogans such as "Workers' Rights are Women's Rights".

Demma Rodriguez, a 38-year-old Google employee and one of the organizers, told the crowd that the workers wanted the technology company to fully exploit its potential as a "brain trust center of the world."

"I'm fed up," she said through a megaphone. "… Every person here has the tools to change Google."

An organizer estimated that there were more than 1,500 Google employees at the protest in New York. The New York office employs more than 8,000 people.

The demonstrators left the park around noon. They finished the rally, chanting, "The time is up. Time is up. Time is up."

The biggest walkout is scheduled on Google's main campus in Mountain View, California, later Thursday.

In a note sent Tuesday to staff, the managing director, Sundar Pichai, apologized for past acts of the company and pledged to adopt a firmer stance regarding inappropriate behavior. years. The technology giant employs more than 80,000 people worldwide.

In their letter, employees asked Google to remove its mandatory arbitration clauses from employee contracts, a widespread but controversial practice preventing US workers from suing their employers. Companies prefer arbitration for sexual harassment complaints because they tend to result in quicker settlements at a lower cost than class actions and can avoid bad publicity for companies.

As a result of the #MeToo move, companies are under increased public pressure to abandon their arbitration policies, said Steve Smith, director of communications at the California Labor Federation, a trade union coordination group. 39; State. "Companies are clearly seeing that this is hurting their image," Smith said.

Uber Technologies Inc. and

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both have stopped using arbitration for sexual related claims over the last year.

At Google, where employees have protested this year against the company's work with the US Department of Defense and its controversial project to search for a censored search engine for Chinese citizens, the employees' scandal about The company's policy on sexual harassment has reached a critical point.

In New York, Laura Rikita, a software engineer who has worked at Google for three years, said she was surprised and angry after reading a recent New York Times article describing how the company had handled her harassment charges. sexual. . She said she left Thursday to push for change in the company and support her colleagues.

"When the article appeared last week about unfortunate events in the past, a lot of Googlers were not happy about that," Ms. Rikita said. "We want to see a difference in the future."

Thomas Kneeland, a software engineer from Google, said colleagues felt they were working in a special place with a mission to "change the world," he said. But he acknowledged that there was "widespread frustration and deep anger" in the ranks.

"We can be exceptional in the future," said Kneeland. "It remains to be seen how."

Write to Douglas MacMillan at [email protected] and Ezequiel Minaya at [email protected]