Google fires 28 staff over Israel protest
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The news: Google has fired 28 employees after they protested the tech giant’s contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud and AI services.
The numbers: The contract, referred to as ‘Project Nimbus,’ is a USD1.2 billion ($1.87 billion) joint contract with Amazon to deliver the tech services to Israel.
The context: The Google employees were dismissed after an investigation found that they staged protests in the company’s New York, Seattle, and California offices this week.
Nine employees were arrested on Tuesday night after a sit-in across the company’s offices, including one in the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. The group that organised the demonstration, No Tech for Apartheid, said that protesters sat in Kurian’s office for over nine hours, wearing shirts and holding banners that read “No more genocide for profit.”
A Google spokesperson told CNN that the protests “were part of a long-standing campaign by a group of organisations and people who largely don’t work” at the company. “A small number of employee protesters entered and disrupted a few of our locations."
In response to the dismissals, No Tech for Apartheid said in a statement published on Medium: “This flagrant act of retaliation is a clear indication that Google values its $1.2 billion contract with the genocidal Israeli government and military more than its own workers.”
According to a Time report earlier this month, No Tech for Apartheid claims to have over 200 Google employees involved in its efforts, while hundreds more workers are sympathetic to its goals.
The source: No Tech for Apartheid X post
