Google fires 28 workers over sit-in protesting its business ties with Israel – Business
Google LLC has fired 28 employees who held protests at two of its offices over the company’s business ties with Israel.
Chris Rackow, the search giant’s vice president of global security, announced the dismissals in an internal memo sent late Wednesday. The protests took place the previous day inside two of the offices Google maintains in New York and Sunnyvale, California.
“You may have seen reports of protests at some of our offices yesterday,” Rackow wrote in the memo. “Unfortunately, a number of employees brought the event into our buildings in New York and Sunnyvale. They took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers.”
The New York sit-in was held inside 111 Eighth Ave., an office building in Manhattan that has served as a Google corporate hub since 2010. The protesters reportedly took over the building’s 10th floor. The New York Police Department said the sit-in involved about 50 people, four of whom were arrested for trespassing.
A parallel protest at the search giant’s Sunnyvale office saw participants stage a sit-in in the office of Google Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian. In a statement, the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety said that about 80 people took part. Five participants who refused to leave the premises were “arrested without incident for criminal trespassing,” booked and released.
The protests focused on Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract with Israel’s government that Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services Inc. won a few years ago. The contract is designed to provide cloud services to the Israeli government and military from local data centers. The protesters who participated in this week’s sit-in demanded that Google exit Project Nimbus.
“This evening, Google indiscriminately fired over two dozen workers, including those among us who did not directly participate in yesterday’s historic, bicoastal 10-hour sit-in protests,” the workers said in a statement. “In the three years that we have been organizing against Project Nimbus, we have yet to hear from a single executive about our concerns.”
“These protests were part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google,” a spokesperson for the search giant said. “Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior.”
Previously, about 600 employees signed a letter asking Google to drop its sponsorship of an event focused on the Israeli tech industry. The event, Mind the Tech, took place in New York late last month. Google later fired an employee who disrupted a Mind the Tech keynote speech given by the general manager of its Israel business.