GitHub apologized and offered a former employee his job back on Sunday, after an investigation found “significant errors in judgment and procedure” after the man, who is Jewish, was fired for warning his colleagues to beware of the Nazis on the day of the Capitol riot.
GitHub, the code sharing site owned by Microsoft Corp. MSFT,
also said that his head of human resources resigned.
The unidentified employee was fired on January 8, two days after posting a message to his colleagues in the Washington, DC area on an internal Slack channel: “stay safe, bro, the Nazis are close by.” Another employee would have taken offense and complained to HR.
Among the far-right factions that participated in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill, which left five people dead, were white supremacists who publicly displayed Nazi shirts and banners.
The resignation generated uproar, both on GitHub and online. In a blog post on Sunday, GitHub’s director of operations, Erica Brescia, said the company opened an outside investigation into the matter last week, which concluded the dismissal was wrong.
“In light of these findings, we immediately revoked the decision to separate from the employee and contacted his representative,” she wrote. “To the employee, we want to say publicly: we sincerely apologize.
Brescia said the company’s head of HR, whose name she did not mention, “took personal responsibility and resigned”. Carrie Olesen had served as the human resources director for GitHub.
Brescia added that “employees are free to express concerns about Nazis, anti-Semitism, white supremacy or any other form of discrimination or harassment in internal discussions.”