Google fired 28 employees on Wednesday, according to an internal memo seen by CNBC, after a series of protests over working conditions and the company’s contract to provide cloud computing and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli government and military.
The news arrives one day after nine Google The workers were arrested on trespassing charges Tuesday evening after staging a sit-in at the company’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, including a protest at the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
Some of the workers arrested in New York and Sunnyvale, who spoke to CNBC on Wednesday, said that during the protest they were locked out of their work accounts and offices, placed on administrative leave and forced to wait to return to work until they will not be contacted. from human resources.
On Wednesday evening, a memo from Chris Rackow, Google’s vice president of global security, told Googlers that “as a result of the investigation, today we have terminated the employment of twenty-eight employees who were found to be affected. We will continue to investigate and take action as necessary.” “. .”
The arrests, which were live-streamed on Twitch by participants, follow demonstrations outside Google’s offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle, which attracted hundreds of participants, according to workers involved. The protests were led by the “No Tech for Apartheid” organization, focused on Project Nimbus: Google and Amazon’s $1.2 billion joint contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing services, including tools of artificial intelligence, data centers and other cloud infrastructures.
“This evening, Google indiscriminately fired more than two dozen workers, including those of us who did not directly participate in yesterday’s historic 10-hour bicoastal protest sit-in,” No Tech for Apartheid said in a statement, adding : “In the three years that we have been organizing against Project Nimbus, we have yet to hear a single executive express our concerns. Google workers have the right to peacefully protest the terms and conditions of our employment. These layoffs were clearly a retaliation”.
The Sunnyvale protesters sat in Kurian’s office for more than nine hours until their arrest, writing demands on Kurian’s whiteboard and wearing T-shirts that read “Googlers Against Genocide.” In New York, protesters sat in a three-story communal space. Five workers from Sunnyvale and four from New York were arrested.
“On a personal level, I am against Google accepting any military contract, regardless of what government it is with or what exactly the contract is about,” Cheyne Anderson, a Washington-based Google Cloud software engineer, told CNBC on Wednesday . . “And I’m of that opinion because Google is an international company and no matter what army it’s with, there will always be people on the receiving end…represented in Google’s employee base and also in our user base.” Anderson had flown to Sunnyvale for the protest at Kurian’s office and was one of the workers arrested Tuesday.
“Google Cloud supports numerous governments around the world in the countries where we operate, including the Israeli government, with our generally available cloud computing services,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday evening, adding: “This work is not directed at highly sensitive subjects, classified or military workloads related to weapons or intelligence services.”
The demonstrations show growing pressure on Google from workers who oppose military use of its AI and cloud technology. Last month, Google Cloud engineer Eddie Hatfield interrupted a keynote speech by the CEO of Google’s Israel business by stating, “I refuse to build technology that fuels genocide.” Hatfield was subsequently fired. That same week, an internal Google employee forum was shut down after staff members posted comments about the company’s Israeli military contracts. A spokesperson at the time described the posts as “controversial content that disrupts our workplace.”
On October 7, Hamas carried out deadly attacks on Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostages. The next day, Israel declared war and began its siege of Gaza, cutting off access to electricity, food, water and fuel. Since that date, at least 33,899 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip, the enclave’s Health Ministry said in a statement on Telegram on Wednesday. In January before the United Nations Supreme Court, Israel rejected South Africa’s accusations of genocide.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense has reportedly sought consulting services from Google to expand its access to Google Cloud services. According to the New York Times, Google Photos is a platform used by the Israeli government to conduct surveillance in Gaza.
“I think what happened yesterday is proof that Google’s attempts to suppress all voices of opposition to this contract are not only not working, but are actually having the opposite effect,” Ariel Koren, a former employee of Google will step down in 2022 after leading efforts to oppose the Project Nimbus contract, it told CNBC on Wednesday. “It’s actually just creating more agitation, more anger and more commitment.”
The New York sit-in began at noon ET and ended around 9:30 pm 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 .
“I realized, ‘Oh, the place I work is very complicit and aiding in this genocide — I have a responsibility to take action against it,’” Ibraheem told CNBC late Wednesday. Ibraheem added: “The fact that I get money from Google and Israel is like paying Google: I get some of that money and that weighed heavily on me.”
The New York workers were released from the police station after about four hours.
The workers were also protesting their working conditions – namely “that the company stop harassing, intimidating, bullying, silencing and censoring Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Googlers – and that the company addresses the health and safety crisis of workers, particularly those at Google.” Cloud, they face because of the potential impacts of their work,” according to a campaign release.
“A small number of employee protesters entered and destroyed some of our locations,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday evening. “Physically impeding the work of other employees and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies and completely unacceptable behavior. After refusing numerous requests to leave the premises, law enforcement has committed to removing them to ensure the safety of the office. We have thus far concluded individual investigations that have resulted in the termination of employment for 28 employees and will continue to investigate and take action as necessary.”
Read the full note below.
Googler,
You may have seen reports of protests in some of our offices yesterday. Unfortunately, several employees brought the event to our buildings in New York and Sunnyvale. They took over offices, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers. Their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive and made colleagues feel threatened. We have investigated the employees involved and blocked their access to our systems. Those who refused to leave were arrested by the police and removed from our offices.
Following the investigations, today we terminated the employment relationship with twenty-eight employees found to be involved. We will continue to investigate and take action as necessary.
Such behavior is not allowed in our workplace and we will not tolerate it. It clearly violates multiple policies that all employees must follow, including our Code of Conduct and the Harassment, Discrimination, Retaliation, Standards of Conduct and Workplace Concerns Policy.
We are a place of business and every Googler is expected to read our policies and apply them to how they behave and communicate in our workplace. The vast majority of our employees do the right thing. If you are one of the few who are tempted to think that we will overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again. The company takes this extremely seriously and we will continue to enforce our long-standing policies to take action against disruptive behavior, up to and including termination.
You should expect to hear more from leaders about standards of behavior and speech in the workplace.
Chris