CALIFORNIA: Google said on Thursday it had terminated twenty-eight employees after some staff participated in protests against the company’s cloud contract with the Israeli government.
The Google unit of Alphabet said that a few protesting employees disrupted work at unspecified office locations by physically impeding others’ work and blocking access to facilities, which it deemed a clear violation of company policies and unacceptable behaviour.
After conducting individual investigations, Google terminated the employment of the 28 individuals involved and committed to ongoing investigations and actions as necessary. In response, Google workers associated with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign criticized the terminations as a “flagrant act of retaliation,” noting that some fired employees had not directly participated in the protests.
The protesting group asserted that Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract awarded to Google and Amazon.com in 2021 to provide cloud services to the Israeli government, supported the Israeli government’s development of military tools.
Google Faced Protests in 2018
This is not the first time Google has faced protests from its employees. In 2018, workers successfully pressured the company to abandon a contract with the U.S. military, known as Project Maven, which was intended to analyze aerial drone imagery for potential military use.
