Google says that a small number of protesting employees entered and disrupted work at a few unspecified office locations. “Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior,” the company said in a statement.
Google will continue to investigate and take action as necessary, the company claims. In a statement on Medium, Google workers associated with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign labeled this action as “flagrant retaliation” and noted that some fired employees did not directly participate in Tuesday’s protests:
This flagrant act of retaliation is a clear indication that Google values its $1.2 billion contract with the genocidal Israeli government and military more than its own workers. 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.
The protesting group emphasized that Google workers have the right to peacefully protest about their labor conditions. They claim that Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract awarded to Google and Amazon in 2021 to provide cloud services to the Israeli government, supports the development of military tools by Israel.
Google, however, maintains that the Nimbus contract is not focused on highly sensitive, classified, or military tasks related to weapons or intelligence services. This incident is not the first time Google employees have protested. In 2018, workers successfully pressured the company to halt a contract with the U.S. military, Project Maven, intended for analyzing aerial drone imagery potentially used in warfare.
