Google terminated the employment of 28 workers following sit-ins at the company’s New York and Sunnyvale, California offices to protest a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. Nine employees were arrested the previous day for trespassing at the two locations.
Google’s spokeswoman stated that obstructing other employees’ work and denying them access to facilities is a breach of company policies and unacceptable behavior.
The tension between Google’s management and some activist employees had been escalating for years over Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion agreement between Google and Amazon to provide cloud services, including artificial intelligence, to the Israeli government. The conflict intensified during the Gaza war in October.
Google recently dismissed an employee who disrupted an Israeli technology conference in New York and is considering modifying a corporate forum due to employee disagreements about the conflict.
Google stated that it is still investigating the protests and that employees in Sunnyvale refused to vacate the office of Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud.
Employees affiliated with the No Tech For Apartheid group, which organized the sit-ins, stated that the dismissals were a form of retaliation and that some of the fired employees did not participate in the protests.
The Nimbus contract, announced in 2021, aimed to supply various Israeli government ministries with cloud software. However, some Google employees have expressed concerns about the company’s involvement in aiding Israel’s military.
Google’s spokeswoman clarified that Nimbus is not intended for highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads related to weapons or intelligence services.
