Google on Thursday fired 28 employees who had occupied offices on Tuesday to protest a contract with the Israeli government, a Google spokesperson said.
Protesters attacked Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s Sunnyvale offices and New York City offices in an effort to force Google to terminate its Project Nimbus contract and stop doing business with the Israeli government. After refusing to leave his Chelsea workspace for nearly 10 hours, he was arrested and given administrative punishment.
“So far, we have completed the individual investigations that led to the termination of 28 employees, and we will continue to investigate and take action as appropriate,” a Google spokesperson said. “Physically interfering with the work of employees or impeding access to our facilities is prohibited.” This is a clear violation of our policies and is completely unacceptable. After refusing multiple requests to leave, law enforcement worked to remove them to secure the office. ”
“Indiscriminate act of mass retaliation”
No Tech For Aparttheid, a project by Jewish Voice for Peace and Linda Sarsour’s MPower Change, said the firings were “an indiscriminate act of mass retaliation.”
Protest groups said some of those fired did not directly participate in the protests.
“Google is afraid of us. They are afraid of workers coming together to demand accountability and transparency from their bosses,” No Tech for Apartheid said on Thursday. “These massive illegal dismissals will not stop us; on the contrary, they will only serve as fuel to further the growth of this movement.”
In addition to the takeover of Google’s workspace, demonstrations took place off site and in Seattle, prompting Google to stop participating in a project to establish a cloud-based data center in the Israeli government’s plan to move much of its IT infrastructure to cloud-based. I asked for it. server.
Google said: “These protests were part of a years-long campaign by organizations and groups of people who rarely work at Google.”
No Tech for Apartheid has been trying to disrupt business between Google and Israel since the company and Amazon won the Project Nimbus contract in 2021. The company issued an open letter and launched a petition opposing the deal, which had garnered 94,305 signatures by Wednesday.
At the 2022 annual general meeting, the apartheid no-tech proposal for Nimbus was rejected. In March, a Google employee was fired after he interrupted Google Israel CEO Barak Regev at an Israeli technology industry conference in New York City.
