(New York) Google fired 28 of its employees who took part in a protest on Tuesday demanding the company abandon a contract with the Israeli army and government, accusing them of preventing their colleagues from go to their workplace.
Several dozen people gathered in front of Google offices in Sunnyvale (California), and took over offices in Seattle (Washington State) and New York.
Some occupied the Sunnyvale office of the general director of Google Cloud (a subsidiary dedicated to remote computing), Thomas Kurian, for several hours.
They demanded the cancellation of a $1.2 billion contract, called Project Nimbus, for remote computing services (cloud) provided by Google and Amazon to the Israeli army and government.
Some of the demonstrators held up signs using the font and colors of the famous Google logo, substituting the word “genocide”, in reference to the Palestinian civilian victims of Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
In October 2021, the British daily The Guardian had published an op-ed from Amazon and Google employees demanding the withdrawal of the two companies from the Nimbus project.
They claimed to have nearly 400 signatories and justified their anonymity by “fear of reprisals”.
“These protests are part of a long campaign led by a group of organizations and people who, for the most part, do not work within Google,” a spokesperson for the group said on Thursday. ‘AFP.
Regarding the “small number” of employees who entered the premises, “physically obstructing the work of other employees and preventing them from accessing our spaces constitutes a clear violation of our rules”, continued the spokesperson, who confirmed that 28 protesting employees had been fired.
Several people were arrested by the police on Tuesday after refusing to evacuate the premises.
The spokesperson reiterated that the Nimbus project was “not intended for highly sensitive, classified or military tasks related to weapons or intelligence services”.
Google employees affiliated with the “No Tech for Apartheid” movement, which compares Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza to the former South African segregation regime, called the firings “retaliation,” in a reaction sent to the ‘AFP.
The measures taken by Google are a “clear sign” that the technology giant “places more value” on the Nimbus contract “than on its own employees,” they said.