Google fired 28 employees on Wednesday, according to an internal memo seen by CNBC, after a series of protests against working conditions and the company’s contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
The news comes one day after nine o’clock Google workers were arrested for trespassing Tuesday night after staging a sit-in at the company’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, Calif., including a protest at the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
Some of the workers arrested in New York and Sunnyvale, who spoke with CNBC earlier Wednesday, said that during the protest they were locked out of their work accounts and offices, placed on administrative leave and told to wait to return at work until contacted. by HR.
On Wednesday evening, a memo sent from Chris Rackow, Google’s vice president of global security, told Googlers that following an investigation, we have today terminated twenty-eight employees involved. We will continue to investigate and take necessary action. “.
The arrests, which were broadcast live on Twitch by participants, followed rallies outside Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle, which drew hundreds of participants, according to the workers involved. The protests were led by the “No Tech for Apartheid” organization, focused on Project Nimbus – the joint $1.2 billion Google and Amazon contract to provide the Israeli government and military with services cloud computing, including AI tools, data centers and other cloud infrastructure.
“Tonight, Google indiscriminately fired more than two dozen workers, including those of us who did not directly participate in yesterday’s historic ten-hour sit-in on both coasts,” No said. Tech for Apartheid in a statement, adding: “In the three years that we have been mobilizing against Project Nimbus, we have yet to hear from any leader about our concerns. Google workers have the right to peaceful protest against the working conditions of our organization These dismissals were clearly retaliation.
The Sunnyvale protesters sat in Kurian’s office for more than nine hours until their arrest, writing their demands on Kurian’s whiteboard and wearing shirts that read “Google Against Genocide.” In New York, protesters sat in a three-story common area. Five workers from Sunnyvale and four from New York were arrested.
“On a personal level, I object to Google taking on military contracts, regardless of which government it is with or what exactly the contract is about,” Cheyne Anderson, a Google Cloud software engineer, told CNBC on Wednesday. based in Washington. . “And I share this opinion because Google is a global company and no matter what military they work with, there will always be people who benefit…represented among Google employees as well as in our base of users.” Anderson had traveled to Sunnyvale for the protest at Kurian’s office and was one of the workers arrested Tuesday.
“Google Cloud supports many 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 intended for highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.
The protests show increased pressure on Google from workers who oppose military use of its AI and cloud technology. Last month, Eddie Hatfield, an engineer at Google Cloud, interrupted a keynote speech by Google’s general manager of Israel operations by declaring, “I refuse to create technology that fuels genocide.” Hatfield was later fired. The same week, an internal discussion forum for Google employees was shut down after staffers posted comments about the company’s Israeli military contracts. A spokesperson at the time described the posts as “divisive content that is disruptive to our workplace.”
On October 7, Hamas carried out deadly attacks against Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostages. The next day, Israel declared war and began besieging Gaza, cutting off access to electricity, food, water and fuel. At least 33,899 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since that date, the enclave’s Ministry of Health said Wednesday in a statement broadcast on Telegram. In January, before the UN’s highest court, Israel rejected South Africa’s accusations of genocide.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense has reportedly sought Google’s consulting services to expand its access to Google Cloud services. Google Photos is one of the platforms used by the Israeli government to monitor Gaza, according to the New York Times.
“I think what happened yesterday is proof that Google’s attempts to suppress all voices of opposition to this contract not only do not work, but actually have the opposite effect,” said Ariel Koren , a former Google employee who resigned in 2022 after leading efforts to oppose the Project Nimbus contract, told CNBC earlier Wednesday. “It just creates more agitation, more anger and more commitment.”
The sit-in in New York began at noon ET and ended around 9:30 p.m. ET. Security asked the workers to remove their banner, which stretched two stories high, about an hour after the protest began, according to Hasan Ibraheem, a New York-based Google software engineer and one of the arrested workers.
“I realized, ‘Oh, the place I work at is very complicit and contributing to this genocide — I have a responsibility to take action against it,'” Ibraheem told CNBC earlier Wednesday. Ibraheem added: “The fact that I’m getting money from Google and Israel is to pay Google – I’m getting some of that money, and that’s weighed very 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 end the harassment, intimidation, intimidation, silencing and censorship of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Googlers – and that the company is tackling the health and safety crisis for workers, particularly those at Google. Cloud, are facing because of the potential impacts of their work,” according to a campaign statement.
“A small number of employee protesters entered and disrupted a few of our locations,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC Wednesday evening. “Physically obstructing the work of other employees and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a blatant violation of our policies and completely unacceptable behavior. After refusing several requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was hired to evict them to ensure the security of the office. We have concluded individual investigations thus far that resulted in the termination of 28 employees, and we will continue to investigate and take appropriate action.”
Read the full memo below.
Googlers,
You may have seen reports of protests at some of our offices yesterday. Unfortunately, a number of employees hosted the event in our New York and Sunnyvale buildings. They invaded offices, damaged our property, and physically obstructed the work of other Googlers. Their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive and made colleagues feel threatened. We have placed the employees involved under investigation and cut off their access to our systems. Those who refused to leave were arrested by law enforcement and expelled from our offices.
After an investigation, we have today terminated twenty-eight employees involved. We will continue to investigate and take necessary action.
Such behavior has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it. This clearly violates several policies that all employees must adhere to, including our Code of Conduct and our Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, Retaliation, Standards of Conduct, and Workplace Concerns.
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 overwhelming majority of our employees are doing the right thing. If you’re one of the few people who thinks we’ll overlook behavior 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 of employment.
You should expect to hear more from leaders about standards of behavior and discourse in the workplace.
Chris
cnbc
