Google terminated 28 employees contract on Wednesday, this happened after a series of protests against labour conditions and the company’s contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.
The news came to light a day after nine Google workers were arrested on trespassing charges Tuesday night after staging a sit-in at the company’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, including a protest in the office of Thomas Kurian the CEO of Google.
Some of the workers who were arrested in New York and Sunnyvale, stated earlier on Wednesday, saying that during the protest they were locked out of their work accounts and offices, and also placed on administrative leave and were told to wait to be contacted by HR before they return.
The same Wednesday evening a memo was sent by the Vice president of google global security telling googlers that “following investigation, today we terminated the employment of twenty-eight employees found to be involved. We will continue to investigate and take action as needed.”
According to him the arrests, were also livestreamed on Twitch by participants, follow rallies outside Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle, which attracted hundreds of attendees, according to workers involved. The protests were led by the “No Tech For Apartheid” organization, focused on Project Nimbus — Google and Amazon’s joint $1.2 billion contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing services, including AI tools, data centers and other cloud infrastructure.
The New York sit-in started at noon ET and ended around 9:30 p.m. ET. Security asked workers to remove their banner, which spanned two floors, about an hour into the protest, according to Hasan Ibraheem, a Google software engineer based in New York City and one of the arrested workers.
“A small number of employee protesters entered and disrupted a few of our locations,” a Google spokesperson said “Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behaviour. After refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety. We have so far concluded individual investigations that resulted in the termination of employment for 28 employees, and will continue to investigate and take action as needed.”
Google Cloud supports numerous governments around the world in countries where we operate, including the Israeli government, with our generally available cloud computing services,” a Google spokesperson stated on Wednesday evening, adding, “This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
