Google CEO Sundar Pichai supports employee walk-out in memo

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Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Google Inc., speaks during the Google I/O Developers Conference in Mountain View, California, U.S., on Tuesday, May 8, 2018. 

Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent an internal email on Tuesday condoning an employee protest planned for Thursday in the wake of a bombshell New York Times’ report about sexual misconduct at the company, a source tells CNBC.

Pichai’s note, previously obtained by Axios, follows up on a memo he sent staff last week, where he wrote that the company had made changes in recent years to take “an increasingly hard line” on inappropriate conduct at work, and had fired 48 people, including 13 senior managers, in the last two years, without exit packages.

In his latest memo, Pichai clarifies that the company also had not provided exit packages to employees who resigned while the company was investigating claims of sexual harassment.

The original New York Times’ report alleged that Google gave former Android leader Andy Rubin a $90 million exit package despite finding sexual misconduct claims against him credible (Rubin denied misconduct through a spokesperson and on Twitter).

Richard DeVaul, another one of the employees named by the Times’ as having exhibited inappropriate behavior, resigned earlier on Tuesday.

In light of the Times’ reporting on how Google shielded some of its executives, a group of employees are organizing a walk-out to take place on Thursday. Pichai said in his latest note that Google’s head of people operations, Eileen Naughton, would make sure that managers “were aware of the activities planned for Thursday” and that employees would have the “support” they needed.

Pichai also said in his memo that he’d heard from many employees, some of whom raised “constructive ideas” to improve Google’s processes and policies around sexual misconduct, and that the company would take action on some of them. He also said that it was clear that the apology from a previous all-hands meeting wasn’t enough and he reiterated that he was “deeply sorry” that past actions had “caused pain.”