Google on Thursday fired 28 employees who had occupied its offices in protest of contracts with the Israeli government on Tuesday, a Google spokesperson said.
The protesters were arrested and put on administrative leave after refusing to leave Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s Sunnyvale office or the New York City Chelsea workspace for almost 10 hours in a bid to push Google to cancel the Project Nimbus contract and cease business with the Israeli government.
“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,” said a Google spokesperson.
“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.”
'Indiscriminate act of mass retaliation'
No Tech For Apartheid, a project by Jewish Voice for Peace and Linda Sarsour’s MPower Change, said the terminations were an “indiscriminate act of mass retaliation.”
The protest organization said some of those fired had not directly participated in the protest.
A Google spokesperson told the Post that every person who had been terminated "was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings. We carefully confirmed every single one (and then actually reconfirmed each one) during our investigation. The groups were live-streaming themselves from the physical spaces they had taken over for many hours, which did help us with our confirmation. And many employees whose work was physically disrupted submitted complaints, with details and evidence. So the claims to the contrary being made are just nonsense."
No Tech for Apartheid claimed that the response by Google showed that they were making an impact.
“Google is terrified of us. They are terrified of workers coming together and calling for accountability and transparency from our bosses,” No Tech for Apartheid said Thursday. “These mass, illegal firings will not stop us. On the contrary, they only serve as further fuel for the growth of this movement.”
The occupations of Google workspaces were joined by demonstrations outside the premises and in Seattle, seeking to push Google to end participation in the project for establishing cloud-based data centers in a plan to move a majority of the Israeli government’s IT infrastructure to cloud-based servers.
“These protests were part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google,” said Google.
No Tech for Apartheid has been seeking to disrupt business between Google and Israel since it and Amazon won the contract for Project Nimbus in 2021. It issued a public letter and started a petition against the contract, which had amassed 94,305 signatures by Wednesday.
At a 2022 annual stockholders meeting, a No Tech for Apartheid proposal against Nimbus was rejected. In March, a Google employee was fired after interrupting Google Israel CEO Barak Regev at an Israeli tech industry conference in New York City.