New York Post

GOOGLE AX STILL SWINGS

Activists up rhetoric

- By ARIEL ZILBER

Google fired at least 20 more workers following protests last week at the tech giant’s offices over its ties to Israel — bringing the total number of terminated staff to more than 50, a group representi­ng the employees said.

The group organizing the protests, No Tech For Apartheid, said Google canned 30 workers last week — higher than the initial

28 they had announced — after staffers held sitins at Google’s headquarte­rs in Sunnyvale, Calif., as well as its Manhattan office.

Then, on Monday night, Google fired “over 20” more staffers, “including nonpartici­pating bystanders during last week’s protests,” said Jane Chung, a spokeswoma­n for No Tech For Apartheid, without providing a more specific number.

“Google is throwing a tantrum because the company’s executives are embarrasse­d about the strength workers showed at last Tuesday’s historic sitins, as well as their botched response to them,” the No Tech for Apartheid group said in a statement.

“Now, the corporatio­n is lashing out at any worker that was physically in the vicinity of the protest — including those who were not at all involved in the campaign.”

After the initial round of firings, Google CEO Sundar Pichai (inset) circulated a memo to the company’s employees saying that the office was not the appropriat­e setting to “debate politics.”

The dissent centered on “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing and artificial-intelligen­ce services.

Some of the employees — many of whom covered their faces with masks while wearing traditiona­l Arab headdress — brazenly barged into the offices of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in Sunnyvale and livestream­ed the protest on Twitch.

Others occupied the 10th floor of the company’s offices in Chelsea.

A company spokespers­on told The Post on Tuesday that Google conducted an investigat­ion into the “physical disruption inside our buildings on April 16,” adding, “every single one of those whose employment was terminated was personally and definitive­ly involved in disruptive activity.”

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