Google HR chief steps down after 20,000-strong worldwide staff walkout over sex scandal

Google’s HR chief is stepping down after the tech giant hushed up payments for executives involved in sexual misconduct and then fired staff who organised protests.

Eileen Naughton’s move was confirmed on Monday. While ‘vice president of people operations’, Naughton oversaw the addition of 70,000 employees to the work force.

CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, Sundar Pichai said: ‘We’re grateful to Eileen for all she’s done and look forward to her next chapter at Google.’

Naughton said: ‘My husband and I have decided – after six years on the road, first in London and now San Francisco – to return home to New York to be closer to our family.’ 

Naughton had faced a mass walkout of some 20,000 staff around the world in 2018 over huge severance packages going to executives implicated in sexual misconduct claims.

Since the walkout, many staff members reported that Google was hitting back at those making allegations. And there was controversy when four members of staff – some involved in organizing the walkouts – were fired in November 2019.

It increased tensions at Google, which had previously had a laid-back Silicon Valley culture and recently cancelled a series of company-wide meetings during which employees could ask questions of executives.

Among the four fired in November, Laurence Berland and Rebecca Rivers told The New York Times their jobs were axed after they raised reservations internally about Google’s work Customs and Border Protection.

Google claimed that the four had violated data and security policies. 

The dismissals of the quartet – dubbed the ‘Thanksgiving Four’ on social media – deepened staff-management tensions at a company once seen as a paradigm of Silicon Valley freedoms but now embroiled in numerous controversies. 

Among the four fired in November, Laurence Berland and Rebecca Rivers told The New York Times their jobs were axed after they raised reservations internally about Google’s work Customs and Border Protection (pictured: Google’s London headquarters)

‘If we can’t speak up about these issues that concern us about our work, Mr Berland told the paper, ‘how can we ever hold ourselves and each other to the high standard that we need and the world deserves? Silence and secrecy are not the way for us to come together to solve problems.’

In recent years, the Google workplace has been disrupted by employee opposition to top-level decisions ranging from forging contracts with the US military to tailoring a version of the search engine for China. 

Employees in 2018 were upset over the payment of $90millon made to senior developer Andy Rubin, who co-founded Google’s mobile operating system, and who was accused of sexual misconduct. 

Employees were upset over a massive payout that Google made to senior developer Andy Rubin (pictured), who co-founded Google’s mobile operating system, and who was accused of sexual misconduct

A New York Times report stated that Google founder Larry Page, acting as CEO, personally asked for Rubin’s resignation after a Google investigation found that a female employee within the company credibly accused him of sexual harassment.

Rubin, who was married at the time, is alleged to have coerced the woman into oral sex during an encounter in a hotel room in 2013.

Rubin denied wrongdoing. To expedite his exit from the company, Google agreed to pay Rubin a severance package.