Responding to Google employees' mass walkout worldwide, Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of the company, said, "We don’t run the company by referendum", reported Bloomberg.

“There are many good things about giving employees a lot of voice, out of that we have done well," Pichai said at a press coneference in New York, as reported by the agency.

Google employees staged a walkout on Thursday morning to protest the internet company's lenient treatment of executives accused of sexual misconduct.

The Google protest, billed "Walkout For Real Change," is unfolding a week after a New York Times story detailed allegations of sexual misconduct about creator of its Android software, Andy Rubin. The report said Rubin received a $90 million severance package in 2014 even though Google concluded the sexual misconduct allegations against him were credible.

According to the company's policy, it doesn’t offer payouts to people it fires for sexual harassment, the Bloomberg report said. Rubin, however, has derided the Times story article as inaccurate and denied the allegations in a tweet.

The same story also disclosed allegations of sexual misconduct of other executives, including Richard DeVaul, a director at the same Google-affiliated lab that created far-flung projects such as self-driving cars and internet-beaming balloons. DeVaul had remained at the "X'' lab after allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced about him a few years ago, but he resigned Tuesday without severance, Google confirmed Wednesday.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologised for the company's "past actions" in an email sent to employees on Tuesday. "I understand the anger and disappointment that many of you feel," Pichai wrote. "I feel it as well, and I am fully committed to making progress on an issue that has persisted for far too long in our society. and, yes, here at Google, too."

The email didn't mention the reported incidents involving Rubin, DeVaul or anyone else, but Pichai didn't dispute anything in the Times story.

Pichai and Eileen Naughton, Google's executive in charge of personnel issues last week disclosed that Google had fired 48 employees , including 13 senior managers, for "sexual harassment" in recent years without giving any of them severance packages.

However, the walkout signaled that the employees remained unconvinced even after the assurance.

The company has more than 50,000 full-time employees and has maintained a more transparent culture compared to other corporate behemoths, said the Bloomberg report.

(With inputs from AP)

First Published:Nov 2, 2018 1:06 PM IST