Google fired the 28 employees who protested against the Alphabet division’s $1.2 billion cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government, just days after they staged sit-ins at offices around the nation.
The protests took place Tuesday at offices in New York City, Sunnyvale, California, Seattle and elsewhere. The group in Sunnyvale occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and livestreamed the sit-in on a Twitch channel called “notech4apartheid.”
On the stream, they said New York staffers had been arrested after they sat down in a common space in the office and opened up a banner reading, “No Tech for Genocide.” They were released several hours later.
The protest focused on Project Nimbus, the cloud computing service Google provides Israeli government agencies in partnership with Amazon as part of a contract worth $1.2 billion.
The group also has a website, NoTechForAparteid.com, which encourages visitors to petition both Google and Amazon to stop doing business with Israel.
While the contract has long been an issue for some of Google’s staffers, the tensions surrounding it have escalated since the start of Israel-Gaza war in October, The New York Times reported.
Google Vice President for Global Security Chris Rackow said in a company-wide email that the staffers were let go after “they took over our office spaces, defaced our property and physically impeded the work of other Googlers..”
“Their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made co-workers feel threatened,” said the memo, which CNBC posted.
Rackow said the 28 were fired after an investigation. “We will continue to investigate and take action as needed,” he wrote. “Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it.”
“The overwhelming majority of our employees do the right thing,” Rackow continued. “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again.”
No Tech for Apartheid said in a statement that the comapny “indiscriminately” engaged in “wholesale firings,” including of some workers who did not take part in the protests “through a dragnet of in-office surveillance” and denied damaging property or threatening colleagues.
“This flagrant act of retaliation is a clear indication that Google values its $1.2 billion contract with the genocidal Israeli government and military more than its own workers,” the statement said. “In the three years that we have been organizing against Project Nimbus, we have yet to hear from a single executive about our concerns. Google workers have the right to peacefully protest about terms and conditions of our labor. These firings were clearly retaliatory.”
“These mass, illegal firings will not stop us,” the statement continued. “On the contrary, they only serve as further fuel for the growth of this movement. Make no mistake, we will continue organizing until the company drops Project Nimbus and stops powering this genocide.”
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