The employees in question opposed a collaboration aimed at providing the Israeli government and army with storage and artificial intelligence services.
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A sit-in that ends with the door. Google fired 28 of its employees on Wednesday April 17 for participating in protests in two of its offices this week, in New York and California (United States), according to an internal memo obtained by several American media, including CNBC and The Verge.
The fired employees were protesting Google’s involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion online storage and artificial intelligence deal between their company, Amazon and the Israeli government. The tech giant’s collaboration with Israel, which continues its offensive in the Gaza Strip, poses a moral concern, according to these employees. Some of them occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, calling for the project to be stopped and “the end of profits linked to genocide”. They were finally forcibly expelled by the police.
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In an email sent to all employees on Wednesday, Chris Rackow, Google’s head of global security, said that“Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it”. In a response published on its Medium page, the collective No Tech for Apartheid (“No tech for apartheid” in French), which calls for an end to contracts with Israel, denounced “a mass revenge campaign” operated by Google against its protesting employees.
