Google Fires 28 Employees Who Protested Israel Contract
Google fired 28 employees late Wednesday after staff members staged protests against the company’s work with the government of Israel during the war in Gaza.
The terminations came after nine of the tech giant’s employees were arrested following 10-hour sit-in demonstrations at Google offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, on Tuesday. The workers involved in a group named No Tech for Apartheid say they were objecting to Project Nimbus—a $1.2 billion contract awarded to Google and Amazon in 2021 to provide cloud-computing services to the Israeli government.
“They took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers,” Chris Rackow, Google’s vice president of global security, wrote in a companywide memo to staff announcing the firings, according to the New York Post. “Their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made co-workers feel threatened.”