(Bloomberg) — Alphabet Inc.’s Google has fired 28 employees after they were involved in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon.com Inc. to provide the Israeli government with AI and cloud services.
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The protests, led by the organization No Tech for Apartheid, took place Tuesday at Google offices in New York City, Seattle and Sunnyvale, California. Protesters in New York and California staged a nearly 10-hour sit-in, while others documented the action, including via a Twitch livestream. Nine of them were arrested Tuesday evening on charges of trespassing.
Several employees involved in the protests, including those not directly involved in the sit-in, received a message from the company’s Employee Relations group informing them that they had been placed on leave. Google told affected employees that it is “keeping this matter as confidential as possible and only releasing information on a need-to-know basis” in an email seen by Bloomberg. On Wednesday evening, the employees were told they were being fired by the company, according to a statement from Google employees of the No Tech for Apartheid campaign.
“Physically interfering with the work of other employees and denying them access to our facilities is a clear violation of our policies and completely unacceptable behavior,” Google said in a statement about the protesters. “After multiple requests to vacate the premises were denied, law enforcement was called in to remove them to ensure the safety of the office. We have completed individual investigations to date which have resulted in the termination of employment of 28 employees and will continue to investigate and take action as appropriate.”
Google has long championed a culture of open debate, but employee activism in recent years has tested that commitment. Employees who staged a strike in 2018 over the company’s handling of sexual assault allegations said Google punished them for their activism. Four other employees claimed they were fired for organizing opposition to Google’s work at federal Customs and Border Protection and for other workplace advocacy.
U.S. labor law gives employees the right to participate in collective action regarding working conditions. Tech workers will likely argue that this should give them the ability to collaborate and object to how the tools they create are used, said John Logan, a labor professor at San Francisco State University.
“Tech workers are not like other types of workers,” he said. “In this case, you can argue that having some say, control, or ability to protest the way their work product is used is actually kind of a key issue.”
Tech companies like Google have a reputation for having “more egalitarian and very cosmopolitan work cultures, but when they faced labor activism among their own employees, they actually responded in a rather draconian way,” Logan added.
Two Googlers involved in the California protest told Bloomberg that a group of employees had gathered on the sixth floor of Google’s Sunnyvale office, where Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian’s office is located, to show support for those who organized a sit-in. . It is unclear how Google identified the protest participants, as only some had their badges scanned by security personnel, and some of those fired were outside Google offices, the employees said.
One employee said Google may have framed the move to initially place employees on leave as “confidential” to save face publicly, and argued that the protesters did not violate any company policies. The protesters left the building as soon as they were asked and did not hinder or disrupt others at the business, the person said.
In addition to the protest, Google has struggled to manage the internal debate over the conflict in the Middle East. After the demonstration, posts on internal Google forums showed a mix of pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli sentiment, with some other employees saying they felt the topic was inappropriate for the workplace, a Google employee said. Moderators closed some discussions on the topic, saying previous discussions had become too heated, the employee added.
Despite Google’s response, workers demonstrating against Project Nimbus have seen an increase in support since the sit-in, one of the fired workers said.
(Updates with Google’s response)
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