Google fires 28 staff after protest against firm’s contract with Israeli government | Google

Google announced Thursday that it had laid off 28 employees after some employees participated in protests against the company’s cloud contract with the Israeli government. Employees staged sit-ins in their offices, some lasting more than eight hours.

The Alphabet unit said a small number of pro-Palestinian employees entered and disrupted work in a few unspecified offices. They occupied the office of Google Cloud’s chief technology officer and held up posters reading “No Apartheid in the Cloud,” “Googlers Against Genocide” and “Don’t Be Mean, Stop Retaliation,” a reference to the old Google company slogan. New York police made four trespassing arrests in response to the protest, while Sunnyvale police made five, according to the New York Post. Around fifty demonstrators occupied the Google office in New York; about 80 people demonstrated in Sunnyvale.

“Physically obstructing the work of other employees and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a blatant violation of our policies and completely unacceptable behavior,” the company said in a statement.

Chris Rackow, Google’s vice president of global security, was more direct in an email to employees, according to CNBC: “If you are one of the few who are tempted to think that we will overlook behaviors that violate our policies, think again.”

Google said it had concluded individual investigations, resulting in the firing of 28 employees, and would continue the investigation and take appropriate action.

In a statement, Google employees affiliated with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign called it a “blatant act of retaliation” and said some employees who did not directly participate in Tuesday’s protests were also among those fired. by Google.

“Tonight, Google indiscriminately fired 28 workers, including those of us who did not directly participate in yesterday’s historic ten-hour sit-in on both coasts. This clearly indicates that Google values ​​its $1.2 billion contract with the genocidal Israeli government and military more than its own workers,” the statement read.

The protest faction claims that Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract awarded to Google and Amazon.com in 2021 to provide cloud services to the Israeli government, supports the Israeli government’s development of military tools.

In its statement, Google said the Nimbus contract “does not target highly sensitive, classified, or military-related weapons or intelligence workloads.”

At a press briefing on Wednesday, Gabriel Schubiner – a software engineer who left his job at Google over the company’s contracts with Israel – said: “Google lied for years about its specific complicity with the army. However, we know from internal organization that this is not true. We know that Google is deeply complicit with the Israeli military. »

Protests against Google are not new. In 2018, workers successfully pushed the company to suspend a contract with the U.S. military, Project Maven, intended to analyze aerial footage from drones with potential application in warfare. Also in 2018, the company experienced a major walkout in response to its handling of sexual harassment by its executives.