Google just fired 28 employees who protested its contract with Israel

Google just fired 28 employees who protested its contract with Israel

SAN FRANCISCO — Google fired 28 employees on Wednesday who were involved in a protest against a contract with the Israeli government that the cloud-computing giant shares with its competitor, Amazon.

The firings came after nine employees were arrested Tuesday while participating in sit-in protests at Google offices in Sunnyvale, Calif., and New York City. The workers were held for a few hours before being released, employees said.

The employees, part of a group called No Tech for Apartheid, have been writing letters and staging protests against Google’s deal to sell technology to Israel since 2021. The tension over the cloud-computing contract, known as Nimbus, among employees at Google and Amazon has increased since the Israel-Gaza war began in October. The project’s critics say it will bolster the Israeli government’s surveillance of Palestinians and lead to further displacement and discrimination.

In an email statement, a Google spokesperson said the workers were fired for “physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities,” which 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,” the email 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 28 fired employees, who were locked out of their work devices Tuesday evening and learned of their termination over email that morning, said they were shocked and angered by the company’s decision.

“I’m furious,” said one of the fired employees who helped organize the sit-in but didn’t directly participate. “This is a wildly disproportionate response to workers standing up for morality and for holding Google accountable for its own promises. Firing people associated with an event they don’t like — it’s unbelievable.”

“This is a huge escalation and a change in how Google has responded to worker criticisms,” added the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for legal reasons.

The employee said members of the No Tech for Apartheid group have spoken with a lawyer about bringing charges against Google for allegedly violating labor law.

Google was originally known for its open internal culture, where employees could access the work documents of other teams and were encouraged to question decisions made by their bosses. In 2010, the company pulled out of China, with executives citing government censorship as a key reason for the decision, despite the potential business opportunity of staying in the country. Microsoft and Apple also have giant China businesses that generate billions in revenue.

Google executives have also participated openly in political protests, including co-founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai, who spoke at a public protest against former President Donald Trump’s proposed ban on immigration from Muslim-majority countries in 2017.

But the company has increasingly fired workers who cause political firestorms and criticize its policies. In 2017, it fired a worker who wrote a memo that said some differences in the numbers of male and female engineers could be explained by biological differences, and arguing the company was too politically liberal. In 2019, Google fired four workers who had been active inside the company, criticizing its work with governments. The workers said they were fired for trying to form a union, and Google said they were fired for accessing internal documents they weren’t supposed to. The company settled a labor law complaint with them several years later.

And in 2020, the company fired Timnit Gebru, a prominent AI researcher who had written a paper laying out how Google’s new AI algorithms could parrot the racist and sexist biases found in the internet data they were trained on.

During the sit-in at Google’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., on Tuesday, workers occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. But employees who participated in the action, videos of which were posted to Instagram, denied that they impeded anyone else at Google from working.

“Even the workers who were participating in a peaceful sit-in and refusing to leave did not damage property or threaten other workers,” Jane Chung, a spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid, said in an email. “Instead they received an overwhelmingly positive response and shows of support.”

Amazon also holds a Nimbus contract with Israel, and Amazon employees participated in the No Tech for Apartheid actions on Tuesday, but there have been no reports of Amazon workers being arrested or fired. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post