GitHub, a technology company owned by Microsoft, apologized Sunday for what its COO, Erica Brescia, called “ significant errors of judgment ” after outrage that it fired an employee who is Jewish for warning that “ Nazis ” would become the pro -Donald Trump gang that attacked the Capitol on Jan.6.
“In light of these findings, we immediately reversed the decision to divorce the employee and are in talks with his representative,” Brescia wrote in a blog post. “We want to say publicly to the employee: we sincerely apologize.”
According to Insider, who first reported the layoff, the tech company fired the employee two days after predicting the potential Nazi links of the uprising in a company chat room. The message reportedly warned “stay safe homies, nazis are about”.
The firing caused immediate outrage among the staff. In response, GitHub hired an outside company to investigate this. The findings, released on Friday, revealed the procedural flaws that led to the tech company relinquishing the employee’s job and the human resources chief resigning on Saturday.
Employees later distributed a letter demanding the company to answer questions about the employee’s dismissal, while also calling on them to denounce white supremacy.
In Sunday’s blog post, GitHub noted that the executive acknowledged that “employees are free to raise concerns about Nazis, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, or any other form of discrimination or harassment” in a previous statement shared with employees.
“It was terrible last week to watch a violent mob, including Nazis and white supremacists, attack the Capitol,” Friedman said. “That these hateful ideologies could reach the sacred seat of our democratic republic by 2021 is sickening.”