28 employees have been terminated by Google following their participation in sit-in protests staged at two company offices this week, as detailed in an internal memo obtained by The Verge. These dismissals follow the suspension and subsequent arrest of nine employees in New York and California on Tuesday.
These employees were protesting Project Nimbus, a joint project between Google and Amazon worth a substantial $1.2 billion cloud contract with the Israeli government. During their protests, some of the fired employees occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian until law enforcement intervened and removed them by force. It’s worth noting that Google had previously dismissed an employee for protesting the same contract during a company presentation in Israel just last month.
Following the protests, Google’s head of global security Chris Rackow sent an internal memo to all employees saying that “behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it.”
Rackow further shared stark warnings against other employees thinking of protesting. He said that the company would take more action if needed.
If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again. 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.
Meanwhile, the group of fired employees who protested against Google, known as the “No Tech for Apartheid” group said in a statement that Google employees have every right to protest.
In the three years that we have been organizing against Project Nimbus, we have yet to hear from a single executive about our concerns. Google workers have the right to peacefully protest about terms and conditions of our labor. These firings were clearly retaliatory.
