Some of the approximately 50 workers that Google fired after an April 16 sit-in to protest the company’s contract with Israel say they are “outraged” over the outcome.
“Google claims everyone fired had been ‘directly involved in disruptive activity,’ but its leadership has yet to even provide an accurate count for the number of workers impacted by its retaliation,” three fired workers wrote in an op-ed Monday in the Nation. “We are disappointed, outraged, and disheartened by Google’s refusal to engage with us.”
Twenty-eight workers were fired on April 17, according to an internal memo obtained by tech news website the Verge. A further 20 or so employees were fired a few days later, the protesters themselves reported on social media.
Google did not verify the number of additional firings but said in a statement to media outlets that the second round came after “additional details provided by coworkers who were physically disrupted, as well as those employees who took longer to identify because their identity was partly concealed — like by wearing a mask without their badge.”
Workers protested in both Sunnyvale and New York City on April 16, and nine were arrested after their hourslong sit-in protests.
In Sunnyvale, they occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian for 10 hours, displaying banners saying “No more genocide for profit” and “No cloud for apartheid” in reference to Project Nimbus, a cloud-computing storage deal.
The protest was “unacceptable, extremely disruptive and made co-workers feel threatened,” Chris Rackow, Google’s head of global security, wrote in an April 17 memo to all employees.
If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again
“If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” Rackow continued. “The company takes this extremely seriously, and we will continue to apply our longstanding policies to take action against disruptive behavior — up to and including termination.”
The next day, Google CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the sit-in in a blog post.
“We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That’s important to preserve,” he wrote. “But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.”
According to Google, the company has more than 180,000 employees worldwide.
Zelda Montes, one of the three fired Googlers who co-wrote the Nation op-ed, also posted on Instagram about her decision to protest Project Nimbus. “I was very sick and tired of Google not listening to workers,” she said in a video.
Project Nimbus is a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract shared jointly by Google and Amazon for storage used across multiple Israeli government ministries.
Google spokesperson Bailey Tomson said in a statement to J. that Nimbus “is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” However, the Israeli Finance Ministry has previously said that the technology would be an “all-encompassing cloud solution” to the government including to the “defense establishment,” Haaretz reported three years ago.
The protest was organized by a group called “No Tech For Apartheid,” which predates the current Israel-Hamas war, but the protesters focused on Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, using the slogan “No Tech For Genocide.” According to the group’s website, the demonstrations were facilitated with help from the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and Muslim activist group MPower Change.