Google fires at least another 20 staffers in wake of anti-Israel sit-ins
Google fired at least 20 more workers following protests last week at the tech giant’s offices over its ties to Israel — bringing the total number of terminated staff to more than 50, a group representing the employees said.
The group organizing the protests, No Tech For Apartheid, said Google canned 30 workers last week — higher than the initial 28 they had announced — after staffers held sit-ins at Google’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., as well as its Manhattan office.
Then, on Monday night, Google fired “over 20” more staffers, “including non-participating bystanders during last week’s protests,” said Jane Chung, a spokeswoman for No Tech For Apartheid, without providing a more specific number.
“Google is throwing a tantrum because the company’s executives are embarrassed about the strength workers showed at last Tuesday’s historic sit-ins, as well as their botched response to them,” the No Tech for Apartheid group said in a statement.
“Now, the corporation is lashing out at any worker that was physically in the vicinity of the protest—including those who were not at all involved in the campaign.”
After the initial round of firings, Google CEO Sundar Pichai circulated a memo to the company’s employees saying that the office was not the appropriate setting to “debate politics.”
The internal dissent centered on “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.
Some of the employees – many of whom covered their faces with masks while wearing traditional Arab headdress – brazenly barged into the offices of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in Sunnyvale and livestreamed the protest on Twitch.
Others occupied the 10th floor of the company’s offices in Chelsea.
A company spokesperson told The Post on Tuesday that Google conducted an investigation into the “physical disruption inside our buildings on April 16.”
“Our investigation into these events is now concluded, and we have terminated the employment of additional employees who were found to have been directly involved in disruptive activity,” the spokesperson said.
The Google rep said that “every single one of those whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings.”
The company didn’t specify how many were fired.
In Pichai’s 1,200-word memo, he wrote Google “is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.”
“This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted,” he added in the memo sent late Thursday.
Project Nimbus was originally announced in April 2021, but the eruption of hostilities between Israel and Gaza has brought the issue to the fore.
Tech employees at both Amazon and Google have voiced concerns that the technology could be used by Israel’s military against Palestinians.
Last month, a Google software engineer was fired after he was filmed publicly berating one of the company’s Israel-based executives during a tech conference in Manhattan.
