About 20 more Google staffers were fired in the past week following the in-office protests against the company’s cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, The Washington Post reported.
The latest pink slips follow the expulsion of at least 28 employees last week after they held sit-in demonstrations at Google offices across the country, including New York and Sunnyvale, California, where several staffers were arrested.
More than 50 Googlers are believed to have lost their jobs over their actions protesting the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract.
The staffers organized under the banner #NoTechForApartheid maintain that the tech enables Israel to harm Palestinians, claims Google denies, maintaining that the deal does not involve highly sensitive, classified or military services.
The firings also follow a companywide memo sent out by CEO Sundar Pichai that told employees they should not use the company as a “personal platform” or “fight over disruptive issues or debate politics” at work.
“We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That’s important to preserve,” the memo said. “But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business.”
Staffers opposed to the Israeli contract unsurprisingly see the issue differently.
“The corporation is attempting to quash dissent, silence its workers and reassert its power over them,” said Jane Chung, a spokesperson for the dissident group,which first started Google’s and Amazon’s contracts with the Israeli government in 2021, told The Post.
She claimed some of the staffers who lost their jobs were “innocent bystanders” rather than those who participated in the protests, which Google denied.
A Google spokesperson told Forbes “every single one of those whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings,” something the company “carefully confirmed and reconfirmed.”
The firings came amid a wave of escalated strife on campuses across the country as protesters are accused of antisemitism.
