NEW YORK: Google has sacked at least 20 more workers for protesting an agreement with the Israeli government amid the war in Gaza, bringing the total number of fired staff to 50.
The tech giant signed “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with artificial intelligence and cloud computing services.
Workers staged sit-in at Google offices in New York and Sunnyvale, last week.
According to the group organizing the protests, No Tech for Apartheid, the company sacked 30 workers last week.
Google on Tuesday fired over 20 more staffers, said Jane Chung, a spokeswoman for No Tech for Apartheid.
Chung in a press release said Google is attempting to crush dissent, silence its workers, and reassert its power over them.
It said that Google has decided to unceremoniously, and without following procedure, end the livelihoods of over 50 of its employees.
Google said it sacked the additional workers after its inquiry gathered details from coworkers and it identified employees who used masks to hide their identities.
The company disputed the protesting group’s claims, saying that it confirmed carefully that every single person who was sacked was personally and definitively involved in the disruptive activity inside its buildings.
The Mountain View, California, company had signaled that more people could be sacked, with CEO Sundar Pichai hinting in a blog post that employees would be on a short leash as the company intensifies its measures to improve its AI technology.
