Google has fired 28 employees after they were involved in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon.com Inc. to provide the Israeli government with AI and cloud services. The employees had taken part in a sit-in protest at the tech giant’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California.
According to a New York Post report, the pro-Palestinian employees donning traditional Arab headscarves had stormed and occupied the office of a top executive in California on Tuesday, April 16. They were terminated late on Wednesday, April 17, after an internal investigation. The news of the firing was shared by Google vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, in a company-wide memo.
The protesters in New York office of the company had occupied the 10th floor of the building in Manhattan. There were protests in the Seattle offices of Google as well.
In the memo, Rackow reportedly wrote, “They took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers. Their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made co-workers feel threatened.”
“Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we 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”, Rackow further wrote in the memo as per the New York Post.
The memo further read, “The overwhelming majority of our employees do the right thing. If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again.”
The protests were led by staffers affiliated with the ‘No Tech for Apartheid’ organisation which has been upset with Google’s response to the Israel-Hamas war. Some protesters in New York and California staged a nearly 10-hour sit-in at the offices, with others sharing the protest through a Twitch livestream. Nine of the protesters were arrested after the protest on trespassing charges.
The protesters are demanding that Google pull out of the $1.2 billion “Project Nimbus” contract, under which, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services provide cloud-computing and artificial intelligence services for the Israeli government and military. They are saying that the technology could be used against Palestinians in Gaza.
