Over the past year, Cisco publicly looked like one of the few tech companies that had avoided internal backlash over its response to the war in Gaza. Chuck Robbins, the CEO of the Silicon Valley giant known for its routers, cybersecurity services, and WebEx video calling, issued a statement last November acknowledging the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians.
And as recently as two months ago, Francine Katsoudas, Cisco’s chief people, policy, and purpose officer, smiled as she posed for photos with many of the company’s employee organizations, including the one for Palestinians. However, this photo later became a source of significant contention within the company.
Behind the scenes, eight current and one former employee who spoke with WIRED allege, Cisco has marginalized its internal Palestinian advocacy groups and their hundreds of members. Throughout a turbulent period beginning this past July, the people allege that the company has failed to promptly and adequately police harassment of Palestinian employees and their allies on its intra-company forums despite detailed complaints. They further allege that Cisco halted an internal petition calling for limiting sales to Israel over potential human rights concerns.
“We have been targeted and harassed, sabotaged and defamed,” says João Silva Jordão, a software licensing manager in Lisbon who quit Cisco last month in disgust after four years at the company. “I was led to believe my humanitarian side was welcome at Cisco, but I was absolutely defrauded. It’s double standards and hypocrisy.”
Meanwhile, another recent ex-employee, who was fired, says some Jewish workers at Cisco believe the company has not adequately stopped harassment against them by the Palestinian groups. This person criticized executives for not doing more to shut down war discussions by workers on both sides. “Things could have been done by leadership to reduce the mess across the board,” he says. “It’s sad that more wasn’t done.”
Brian Tippens, Cisco’s chief social impact and inclusion officer, refutes the accusations of marginalization and unequal treatment. He says Cisco’s focus has been on the well-being of all of its 90,000 employees, and he apologizes to any who feel the company hasn’t lived up to its humanitarian goals.
Tippens tells WIRED that Cisco doesn’t want to shut down what it views as political speech altogether, but has issued what it calls Expressions Guidelines amid the internal unrest to encourage civility and respect.
“In any large organization employees will have a diverse range of perspectives and at Cisco we see this as a source of strength,” Tippens writes in a statement. “Over the last year, we have had more than a dozen sessions and exchanges with employees representing the Palestinian and Jewish communities to hear their lived experiences and discuss their concerns. We were very thoughtful and deliberate in our decision-making process, and we are confident in both the actions we have taken and those we have chosen not to take.”
The workers’ accusations against Cisco, which are reported here for the first time, show that the workplace strife sparked by the war has breached even a staid tech company known for its buttoned-up and charitable culture rather than staff turmoil.
The accounts from Cisco also underscore how tech workers are lobbying their employers to withdraw support of Israel even after over a year of advocacy has generated little success. Their efforts reflect both the power and limits of worker activism and highlight the lingering disagreement over the extent to which personal views on geopolitics and human rights should bleed into offices.
Just as inside many other companies, including Google and Meta, the tensions at Cisco started in the early days of the conflict. The people who spoke with WIRED say Robbins’ statement recognizing Palestinian employees came after they and other workers organized a call with executives to protest an earlier message that referred to Israel alone. On the call, which was described to WIRED, some Palestinians at the company had shared photos of a few of the at least 400 relatives in Gaza that employees reported were killed in the war.
Then this past May, when a few employees traveled to Lebanon for about 10 days to support Palestinian refugees by providing toys, decorating walls at a daycare, and giving lessons about Cisco technology, the company instructed the workers to keep what it viewed as political statements out of their promotion of the trip, according to Silva Jordão and an email from an employee impact director seen by WIRED.
The company’s concerns included the sharing of photos showing volunteers in unofficial T-shirts they had designed for the trip and paid for on their own. The shirts featured Cisco’s logo in one corner and a large map of Israel at the center, covered with “Palestine” written in Arabic. To the workers, the image depicted ancient Palestine and represented a source of cultural and religious pride. But amid the pushback, a 2-minute, 20-second highlight video of the trip that one of the attendees posted to LinkedIn blurred the map when shown on the shirts.
The Lebanon trip wasn’t sponsored by the company, but it was made possible by the weeks of annual paid time off it encourages each employee to use for volunteering. In August 2023, the company had publicly celebrated employees volunteering in the West Bank. For this year’s trip, workers were told another blog post wouldn’t be possible due to a backlog of content, the similarity with the previous post, and the desire to show photos with the unapproved T-shirts, Cisco’s Tippens says.
Members involved in the company’s Palestinian Network and an informal internal collective called Bridge to Humanity say what they perceive as the company’s alleged silencing of them deepened in July and August. For six weeks, Bridge to Humanity had been gathering signatures for a 33-page internal petition to Robbins, Katsoudas, and chief legal officer Dev Stahlkopf calling for transparency on and potential cancellation of various contracts to provide servers and other gear to the Israeli government. Excerpts seen by WIRED show the signatories alleging that the deals violate the company’s human rights and business conduct policies by enabling mass surveillance and displacement of Palestinians.
In mid-July, Cisco’s Policy Leadership Council, which includes Katsoudas and Stahlkopf, ordered the signature gathering to stop because they felt the way it was being undertaken violated the company’s policy against unwanted solicitation, Tippens says. The executives, according to employees, restricted access to one of the internal webpages developed by Bridge to Humanity and its custom-built communications tool known as WatermelonBot, which had been used to encourage people to sign the petition.
The petition had drawn over 1,700 signatures by that point, an image seen by WIRED shows. But the effort also attracted dozens of human resources complaints from other workers over promoting allegedly offensive content, and Tippens told Bridge to Humanity the campaign was “divisive” and “could not continue,” according to employees, who spoke anonymously to avoid reprimand.
Petitioning employees don’t believe Cisco met any of their primary demands, which include allowing Palestinian Network members some oversight over the company’s contracts with Israel.
Nadim Nashif, executive director of 7amleh, a rights group advocating for Palestinians and supporting the Cisco workers, says they deserve transparency to ensure their work isn’t contributing to potential human rights violations. “All tech companies should be doing heightened human rights due diligence with regards to their business practices and policies in Israel and Palestine,” he says.
In a statement provided through Cisco spokespeople, a Palestinian Network leader, speaking anonymously out of fear for their safety, credited the company for supporting healthy dialog even though “not all conversations” with executives “have resulted in the outcomes that many in the community have advocated for.”
Meanwhile, according to posts seen by WIRED from the internal online discussion forum of Cisco’s Connected Jewish Network, members of the group said they had pulled the names of petition signatories into a spreadsheet. “I’m sure those who have signed aren’t very happy that [name redacted] now has their names in Excel 😂😂😂” Workers who signed were concerned that the exported list could be easily shared outside the company and expose them or their families to harassment, though the fears haven’t appeared to materialize.
In a statement provided by company spokespeople, a leader of the Jewish Network speaking anonymously due to safety concerns says the group espouses empathy and maintains an open mind “to embrace all cultures and advocate for all communities, irrespective of geopolitical events.”
Employees involved in Palestinian groups dispute that sentiment. On August 15, some of them, in concert with concerned Jewish employees, filed a 76-page ethics complaint seen by WIRED accusing over a dozen colleagues of creating a hostile work environment by posting allegedly problematic comments on the Connected Jewish Network forum. “These Cisconians have, among other things, repeatedly glorified violence, joked about sending people to their deaths, likened Palestinians and those with opposing viewpoints to animals,” the complaint seen by WIRED alleged, before going on to explain in vivid detail scores of posts the complainants considered offensive.
Cisco spent about two months investigating. It led “to removal of comments, discipline warning and coaching for multiple employees,” Tippens says.
The sources who spoke with WIRED found the response insufficient, especially after the company had previously dismissed an employee who in July wrote, in an internal post seen by WIRED, that petition signatories should “quit living and make this world a better place for all.” Tippens says Cisco took appropriate action in that case. The fired employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he regretted the remark and criticized the company for rejecting his apology. “I let momentary anger and frustration get the better of me,” he says. “My intent was never for someone to die; it was for hatred to not exist.”
The disputed photo with Katsoudas, Cisco’s people chief, dates back to the company’s Inclusive Communities breakfast on August 28 at its annual GSX sales conference in Las Vegas. Employees and a company-hired photographer took shots of her and Tippens alongside some Palestinian Network members who were wearing the T-shirts from the Lebanon trip with the map and “Palestine” written in Arabic.
On August 29, an employee posted to LinkedIn one of the photos with Katsoudas that a colleague had captured. It quickly attracted over 200 likes and dozens of comments, with some viewers recognizing Katsoudas. One commenter wrote that they found it “offensive and unprofessional” for a Cisco executive to be supporting “clear one-sided propaganda.”
Another LinkedIn user, Gary Kremen, a serial entrepreneur who cofounded Match.com, commented, “I’ve called the purchasing department already and we’re gonna be reevaluating our $3 million Cisco purchase.” When contacted by WIRED, Kremen declined to say which company’s order he was referring to but briefly elaborated on his comment. “Should an infrastructure provider’s employees take political positions?” he says. “If you don’t have a policy of ‘Don’t get involved in politics,’ you’re going to run into issues.”
By August 30, the LinkedIn post had found its way to the Connected Jewish Network forum. “This image and what it stands for are comparable in meaning to the chant ‘From the river to the sea,’ which has been officially condemned by a US resolution,” an employee wrote in a post seen by WIRED, appearing to reference an April vote by the House of Representatives. “It was even more disappointing to see Fran [Katsoudas] in the picture, further implicating Cisco’s connection to this obscenity.”
An executive on the forum likened wearing the T-shirt to engaging in “egregious” behavior. “No one can rewrite history and we are not going anywhere,” he wrote.
By that evening, Katsoudas issued a response. “I unwittingly posed for a picture where there was imagery that I didn’t understand,” she wrote. “I went to that breakfast to be supportive of all our communities, not to be used in a manner that creates hurt towards our Jewish community.”
She continued that in hindsight, she had determined that the T-shirts had violated company policies against political statements, symbols, and discriminatory language. “I am sorry for being unaware of the symbolism depicted on the T-shirts,” she added. “I feel awful.”
On August 31, the author of the LinkedIn post removed it after Katsoudas expressed concern about the feedback it was generating and the alleged policy violation it depicted, according to a worker familiar with the matter. The author promptly obeyed and took it down, employees say. The company went on to share a folder of professional photos from the breakfast, but ones with the disputed T-shirt weren’t included, workers say.
Still, that day meant to honor Cisco’s culture of inclusion has left a lasting imprint on employees. They allege that at a lunch gathering in the hours following the breakfast photos, a male Israeli employee berated a female executive sponsor of the Palestinian Network about the group’s presence. (The alleged harasser didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Cisco took action against him, workers say. The executive sponsor is leaving the company.
The altercation continues to reverberate. Several of the employees who spoke with WIRED say they have disobeyed return-to-office mandates because they are terrified about their safety.
“A lot of us, myself included, are disillusioned with Cisco,” one employee says. “Cisco spills a lot of money to project that it cares, and when you hold the mirror up, it becomes clear that Cisco doesn’t care at all unless you fit a certain mold. That’s troubling and sad.”
Tippens says company management continues to listen and learn.
Source : Wired
