Employees at two different Google offices on Tuesday spoke out against a $1 billion contract the company signed with a U.S. ally in 2021 and protested the company's work with the Israeli government.
Protesters organized two sit-ins at offices in Sunnyvale, California, and New York City.
The Sunnyvale office sit-in was organized by anti-apartheid activist group No Tech. They entered Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's office and demanded that he not leave until the tech giant backed out of its $1.2 billion contract.
The contract Google shares with Amazon, known as Nimbus, provides cloud computing services to the Israeli government. The contract was signed in 2021. The deal faced opposition from workers and activists from the start, but opposition escalated due to Israel's continued military operations in Gaza, sparked by the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack.
Google Software engineer Emaan Haseem and his colleagues oppose the company's involvement with the Israeli government, despite the potential repercussions.
“I don't want to lose my job,” Haseem told ABC 7 News. “But I don't think it's possible to continue going to work every week without acknowledging and loudly condemning the Nimbus program and support for the Israeli government.”
The deal, known as Project Nimbus, was structured to allow Google and Amazon to share their services with various departments of the Israeli government. When signed in 2021, Israeli authorities said companies could not suspend services or ban services to specific government agencies, making the deal difficult among some employees. caused concern.
Time magazine reported last week that Google is providing cloud computing services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
“Google Cloud uses publicly available cloud computing services to support many governments around the world in countries where we operate, including the government of Israel,” a Google spokesperson said. said in a statement to The Hill.
“The Nimbus contract is for workloads run on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries and agencies, and we acknowledge that the Israeli government ministries have agreed to abide by our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy. We are clear,” the spokesperson said. “This work is not intended for highly sensitive classified or military workloads related to weapons or intelligence.”
A Google spokesperson said the protests “primarily” involve organizations and people who don't work for the company.
The company said it would investigate and “take action” regarding employees who took administrative leave.
“A small number of employee protesters entered several of our locations and caused disruption,” the spokesperson said. “Physically interfering with the work of other employees or preventing access to our facilities is a clear violation of our policies and we will investigate and take action.
These employees have been placed on administrative leave and their access to our systems has been blocked. After refusing multiple requests to leave, law enforcement worked to remove them to secure the office. ”
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