Sundar Pichai tells Google staff he doesn’t want any more political debates in the office after firing 28 employees over Israeli contract protest

In a world where sociopolitical issues are increasingly divisive, saying the perceived wrong thing on gender identity or the Israel-Palestine conflict could make you a victim of cancel culture—or, fired from your job.

Now, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has weighed in on the debate over the relative values of political expression and workplace coexistence by ordering employees to leave their political opinions at home.

A day after firing 28 workers for participating in a sit-in protest of the tech giant’s cloud contract with Israel, Pichai warned staff that the office is not a place “to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics” in a company blog post.

Although Pichai didn’t specifically mention the protests or the Israel–Hamas war, he concluded that the $1.92 trillion company “is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform.”

“We have a duty to be an objective and trusted provider of information that serves all of our users globally,” Pichai continued.

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