Google terminated 28 employees this week after sit-ins at the company’s New York and Sunnyvale, Calif., offices that protested a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. Nine employees were also arrested this week on charges of trespassing at both offices.
“Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior,” said a Google representative in a statement.
In California, the employees refused to leave the office of Google Cloud’s chief executive, Thomas Kurian. The employees are affiliated with a group called No Tech for Apartheid, which organized the protests and called the terminations “a flagrant act of retaliation.” The group also said Google fired some employees who were not involved in the sit-ins.
Google’s Nimbus contract, first announced in 2021, was to provide Israeli government ministries with cloud software. Some employees voiced concern that the contract aided Israel’s military, although that belief was rejected by Google.
