“Google Fires Protesters Over Israeli Contract”
“Google Fires Protesters Over Israeli Contract”
Google has fired 28 employees because they were involved in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint venture with Amazon.com to provide AI and cloud services to the Israeli government.
The protests, led by the organization No Tech for Color, took place on Tuesday at Google offices in New York City, Seattle, and Sunnyvale, California. Protesters in New York and California staged nearly 10-hour sit-ins, with others documenting the action, including via a Twitch live stream. Nine of them were arrested on Tuesday evening on charges of eviction.
Many of the protesting workers, including those not directly involved in the sit-in, received a message from the company’s employee relations group informing them that they had been placed on leave.
Google told affected employees
that it was “keeping this matter as confidential as possible, only disclosing information on a need-to-know basis,” in an email seen by Bloomberg. According to a statement from Google staff with the No Take for Optide campaign, the workers were notified Wednesday evening that they were being laid off by the company.
Google representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The activist group said it had not heard directly from any Google executive in the three years of organizing against Project Nimbus.
Google has long supported a culture of open discussion, but employee activism has tested that commitment in recent years. Workers who staged walkouts in 2018 to address allegations of sexual assault at the company said Google punished them for their activism. Four other workers alleged they were fired for opposing Google’s work with federal Customs and Border Protection and other workplace advocacy.
US labor law gives employees the right to engage in collective action regarding working conditions. John Logan, a labor professor at San Francisco State University, said tech workers would likely argue that this should give them the ability to band together to object to how the tools they create are used.
Tech workers are not like other types of workers,” he said. “You could make an argument that having some say or control or the ability to protest how their work product is being used is actually kind of a key issue.
People added that tech companies like Google “have a reputation for having highly egalitarian and highly cosmopolitan work cultures, but when faced with labor activism among their workers, they actually did it pretty hard.” Answered,” added Logan.
Two Googlers involved in the protest in California told Bloomberg that a group of workers gathered on the sixth floor of Google’s Sunnyvale office, where the office of Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Koren is located, to show support for the protesters. happened . According to the employees, the company’s security personnel arrived and told the workers that they were not allowed to record videos or shout slogans.
One worker said Google framed the move to furlough employees as a “secret” to save face publicly, arguing that the protesters did not violate any company policy. The protesters left the building as soon as they were told to and did not disrupt or disrupt others at the company, the person said.
In addition to the protests, Google is struggling to manage internal debate about the Middle East conflict.
After the protest, posts on Google’s internal forums showed a mix of pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel sentiment, with several other workers saying they felt the topic was inappropriate for the workplace, a Google employee said. It is inappropriate. The employee added that moderators had closed some threads on the topic, saying earlier discussions had gotten too heated.
Despite Google’s response, employees demonstrating against Project Nimbus have seen a surge in support since the sit-in, one of the fired workers said.
