Tech giant and search engine company Google has fired 28 of its employees because they were involved in a 10-hour sit-in at the search giant’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, protesting Google's cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.
An investigation found that they had staged protests inside the Big Tech company's offices. According to a post on X, formerly Twitter, by No Tech For Apartheid, the group that organized the demonstration, they entered the Sunnyvale office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. They were reported to hold banners with slogans saying "No More Genocide For Profit" and "We Stand with Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Googlers."
"A small number of employee protesters entered and disrupted a few of our locations. Physically impeding other employees' work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior. After refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety," a Google spokesperson said. "We have so far concluded individual investigations that resulted in the termination of employment for 28 employees and will continue to investigate and take action as needed."
The pro-Palestinian staffers, who wore traditional Arab headscarves as they stormed and occupied the office of a top executive in California on April 16, were terminated the next day following the internal investigation, Google Vice President of global security Chris Rackow said in a companywide memo. "Googlers, you may have seen reports of protests at some of our offices yesterday. Unfortunately, many employees brought the event into our buildings in New York and Sunnyvale," Rackow said in the memo. "We placed employees involved under investigation and cut their access to our systems. Those who refused to leave were arrested by law enforcement and removed from our offices."
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He added that this behavior has no place in our workplace and they will not tolerate it. "It clearly violates multiple policies that all employees must adhere to, including our Code of Conduct and Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, Retaliation, Standards of Conduct, and Workplace Concerns," he further said. The memo also warned: "If you are one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again. The company takes this extremely seriously, and we will continue to apply our longstanding policies to take action against disruptive behavior, up to and including termination."
Google and Amazon have a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli government and military, known as Project Nimbus, according to No Tech For Apartheid. "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 workers," the group said in a statement published on Medium on Thursday. The protesters have demanded that Google pull out of the billion contract. Meanwhile, critics at the company raised concerns that the technology would be weaponized against Palestinians in Gaza.
A New York Police Department (NYPD) spokesperson said the Tuesday protest "involved approximately 50 participants" in total and confirmed that "four arrests were made for trespassing inside the Google building."
The Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety said the protest in California "consisted of around 80 participants." A total of five protesters who refused to leave the Google office were "arrested without incident for criminal trespassing," booked and released, a spokesperson confirmed.
Last month, Google fired a software engineer who publicly blasted one of the company’s Israel-based executives during a tech conference in New York City. A company spokesperson confirmed the firings and said: "These protests were part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google." (Related: Google faces backlash over MASS LAYOFFS in January despite company’s financial success.)
Google CEO's contradicting policies on internal debates
Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently said that while preserving Google's "open culture" in the workplace is important, the company also needs to enforce workplace policies and be "more focused in how we work, collaborate, discuss and even disagree." The tech company wasn't the place "to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics," Pichai wrote in a separate email announcing a restructuring of the company's devices and mobile software divisions. "This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted," he remarked.
However, the company has notably had a history of open internal debate on political issues around the workplace. In fact, they had a companywide meeting after the 2016 elections when former President Donald Trump found his way to the White House. The Big Tech’s bigwigs, including its co-founder Sergey Brin, lamented the victory and debated the impact of their services on the polls.
Meanwhile, some Amazon employees have also protested the contract with Israel. Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group that has criticized the company’s environmental policies, called on the company to cancel the Nimbus contract in February. "Just as we don't want our work to be wielded in helping fossil fuel companies accelerate extraction and destruction, we don’t want our work to be used in service of military and surveillance products like Project Nimbus that continue this genocide," the group posted on X.
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