Google fired twenty-eight employees on Wednesday after participating in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud deal with the Israeli government that also includes Amazon.
Workers at both companies said the deal made cutting-edge technology available to Israel’s security apparatus that could contribute to the killing or harm of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The interception And Time reported that Project Nimbus provides services that can be operated by the Israel Defense Forces.
The twenty-eight layoffs, confirmed by Google, occur a few hours later nine employees were arrested by police Tuesday night for sit-in protests at Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office in Sunnyvale, California, and at a company’s offices in New York. These nine workers were fired, along with nineteen other participants in the demonstration.
Google spokeswoman Anna Kowalczyk said in a statement that the employees were fired after an internal investigation concluded they were guilty of “physically obstructing the work of other employees and causing them to prevented from accessing our facilities. She added that “after refusing several requests to leave the premises, the police undertook to evict them to ensure the security of the offices”. The Nimbus contract “is not intended” for classified or military work, she said.
Tuesday’s action against the Nimbus project comes after the death toll from the IDF’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza climbed to more than 34,000 Palestinians. The military offensive began after Hamas killed around 1,100 Israelis on October 7.
The sit-ins at Google were accompanied by demonstrations of more than 100 people— including many Google employees — in front of the company’s offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle. Google’s Kowalczyk called employee participation “small in number.”
Google’s workforce includes the vast majority of employees at parent company Alphabet, which numbered more than 180,000 at the end of 2023. Several protesters at Google’s New York office told WIRED they had support for within the company beyond those who directly participated in Tuesday’s demonstration.
Jane Chung, a spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid – the coalition of tech workers and activist groups led by Muslims and Jews MPower Change and Jewish Voice for Peace that organized the protests – says some fired workers were involved in much less provocative activities. action than those who held positions.
Some, she said, had simply attended an outdoor protest and picked up a T-shirt handed out by organizers. Others were “flying outside, standing close to protesters for safety.”
Zelda Montes, a former YouTube software engineer who says she was arrested after occupying Google’s New York office for more than ten hours, accuses the company of violating US legal protections for workers.
“It is very clear that Google is engaging in illegal behavior to deter our labor organizations by retaliating against workers who have not been stopped,” Montes says. “I’m disappointed at how mean Google can be, but not surprised: They’re more outraged by employees sitting around peacefully than by the way their technology is murdering people.”
Google’s Kowalczyk said the Nimbus contract “is not intended” for “weapons or intelligence workloads.”