Google has fired 28 employees who participated in protests against Project Nimbus, a cloud contract with the Israeli government, according to an internal memo reviewed by Google. The Verge. This follows the arrest and suspension of nine employees on April 16, as well as their firings last month in connection with the same project.
Some of the fired employees were forcibly removed after occupying Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's office. Google's head of global security, Chris Rakow, said the company “does not tolerate” such incidents and warned that further action could be taken.
“If you are one of the few people tempted to think that we will overlook violations of our policies, think again,” he told employees in the letter. “We take this matter extremely seriously, and we will continue to apply our long-standing policy of taking action against disruptive behavior, up to and including termination.”
This type of behavior has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it. This is a clear violation of multiple policies that all employees must abide by, including our Code of Conduct and our Harassment, Discrimination, Retaliation, Standards of Conduct, and Workplace Concerns policies.
But workers from the group No Skills for Apartheid, which is organizing the protests, claimed the dismissals were a “flagrant act of retaliation”. He added that it was “insulting” for Google to say the protests primarily involved people who don't work for the company, adding that the movement calling for Project Nimbus to be abolished was made by “thousands” of people. He added that he was supported by his colleagues.
“In the three years we have been organizing against Project Nimbus, we have yet to hear from a single executive about our concerns,” he wrote in a Medium post. Labor has the right to peacefully protest the terms and conditions of their contract. These firings were clearly retaliation. ”
