(Bloomberg) – Alphabet Inc.’s Google has arrested 28 employees for their involvement in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint deal with Amazon.com to provide AI and cloud services to the Israeli government and military. fired people.
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The protests, led by the No Technology for Apartheid organization, took place Tuesday across Google’s offices in New York City, Seattle and Sunnyvale, California. Protesters in New York and California held sit-ins for nearly 10 hours, with other participants documenting their actions through Twitch livestreams and other channels. Nine of them were arrested Tuesday night on suspicion of trespassing.
Several workers who participated in the protests, including those who did not directly participate in the sit-in, received messages from the company’s employee relations group informing them that they had been placed on leave. In an email reviewed by Bloomberg, Google told affected employees: “We will keep this matter as confidential as possible and will only disclose information on a need-to-know basis.” A statement from Google staff members involved in the No Technology for Apartheid campaign said the employees were informed on Wednesday night that they would be terminated from the company.
“Physically interfering with the work of other employees and preventing access to our facilities is a clear violation of our policies and is completely unacceptable,” Google said in a statement regarding the protesters. “After refusing multiple requests to leave, law enforcement worked to remove them to ensure the security of the office.” We have completed our investigation and will continue to investigate and take action as necessary.” Build the cloud and expand digital services under Project Nimbus. The Israeli Ministry of Defense and the military are listed in a government statement as partners in the Nimbus program, along with other government agencies. A Google representative said the Nimbus contract “is not intended for highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads related to weapons or intelligence.”
Google has long favored a culture of open discussion, but recent employee activism has put that commitment to the test. Employees who organized a walkout in 2018 over the company’s handling of sexual assault allegations said Google punished them for their activism. Four other workers claimed they were fired for organizing protests against Google’s work with federal Customs and Border Protection and other workplace advocacy.
U.S. labor law provides employees with the right to take collective action regarding working conditions. John Logan, a labor studies professor at San Francisco State University, said this would allow tech workers to come together and challenge how the tools they create are used. He said he would argue that it should be.
“Technology workers are different from other types of workers,” he said. “In this case, to argue that having some say or control or the ability to protest how our work is used is actually some kind of important issue. I can.”
Tech companies like Google have a reputation for having a “more egalitarian and very cosmopolitan work culture,” but when they encounter labor movements among their own employees, they actually have a kind of very international work culture. “We took strict action against them,” Logan added.
Two Google employees who took part in the protests in California told Bloomberg that employees were working on the sixth floor of Google’s Sunnyvale office, which houses the office of Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. The group reportedly gathered to show support for those holding the sit-in. . Employees say it’s unclear how Google identified the protesters, as only some had their badges scanned by security guards, and some of those fired were outside Google’s offices. It is said that it is unknown.
One employee said Google may have initially made the move to give employees time off “secret” to save public face, and that the protesters did not violate company policy. insisted. The people said the protesters left the building as soon as they were asked to do so and did not interfere with or disrupt others inside the company.
Beyond the protests, Google is also struggling with how to manage internal discussions about the Middle East conflict. Google employees said that after the protests, posts on Google’s internal forums contained a mix of pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel sentiments, and many other employees said the topic was inappropriate for the workplace. He said he felt it. The employee added that the moderators had shut down some threads on the subject because the preliminary discussions had become too heated.
Despite Google’s response, employee demonstrations against Project Nimbus have gained support since the sit-in, one fired employee said.
–With assistance from Marissa Newman and Mark Bergen.
(Updated Israeli government statement in 5th paragraph)
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