Google fires 20 more involved in protests of Israeli contract
Google has fired an additional 20 employees who participated in a protest last week against the company’s defense contract with the Israeli government.
This brings the total number of employees laid off due to the protest to 50, according to the group that organized the demonstrations, No Tech for Apartheid.
Jane Chung, a spokesperson for the group, said some of the dismissed employees were “nonparticipating bystanders” during the sit-in protests held on April 16 at Google’s offices in Sunnyvale and New York. The group labeled the tech giant’s action as an “aggressive and desperate act of retaliation.”
While Google confirmed the additional layoffs on Tuesday, it did not provide a specific number.
The Mountain View company had previously described the inoffice protests as “completely unacceptable behavior” that hindered some employees’ access to their facilities, damaged property and created a threatening environment.
A Google spokesperson said that the company has concluded its investigation into the incident, adding, “We have terminated the employment of additional employees who were found to have been directly involved in disruptive activity.”
About 80 people participated in the protest at the Google building on Borregas Avenue in Sunnyvale, police spokesperson Dzanh Le said. Most protesters dispersed shortly after noon, but five remained inside the facility and refused to leave, resulting in their arrests.
Google disputed No Tech for Apartheid’s claim that the company dismissed anyone “physically in the vicinity of the protest,” including those not actively participating in the demonstration.
“To reiterate, every single one of those whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings,” the Google spokesperson said. “We carefully confirmed and reconfirmed this.”
The protests were the latest demonstrations against the company’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.
In December, hundreds of protesters staged a “die-in” in front of Google’s San Francisco offices. A few months before that, in August, Google workers and activists shut down a portion of Howard Street to protest in front of San Francisco’s Moscone Center during the Google Cloud conference.
Google defended its contract, stating it is crucial for infrastructure purposes.
“We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy,” the company said. “This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
The protests came more than six months after an attack by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, which resulted in approximately 1,200 deaths in Israel, according to Lior Haiat, a spokesperson for the country’s foreign ministry. Additionally, Israel’s counteroffensive attacks in Gaza have led to nearly 35,000 deaths, according to the latest count from the Palestinian health ministry.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has urged employees to keep politics out of the workplace and to adhere to the company’s policies of acceptable behavior.