Google fired more anti-Israel activist employees following the termination of 28 workers who had occupied company offices on April 16 to protest Google’s contracts with the Israeli government, a Google spokesperson said on Friday.
The second round of terminations came after Google continued the investigation into employees “who took longer to identify because their identity was partly concealed – like by wearing a mask without their badge,” said the spokesperson.
Some of the details were provided by coworkers who were “physically disrupted” by their colleagues’ actions.
Google said that it had concluded its investigation into the protest occupation of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian Sunnyvale’s office and the New York City Chelsea workspace for almost 10 hours.
No Tech for Apartheid, which led the endeavor in a bid to pressure the tech giant into canceling the Project Nimbus contract and ceasing business with Israel, claimed last Tuesday that a total of 50 workers had been fired.
Terminating anti-Israel employees
“This evening, in an aggressive and desperate act of retaliation, Google fired over 20 additional workers – including non-participating bystanders – during last week’s protests,” claimed No Tech for Apartheid.
“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. 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,” it argued.
A Google spokesperson said that the company was careful to confirm and double-check that “every single one of those whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings.”
No Tech for Apartheid stated that they would not stop organizing protests against the Nimbus contract, which aims to establish cloud-based data centers in a project to move much of the Israeli government’s IT infrastructure to cloud-based servers.
Google has previously said that “these protests were part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google.”
No Tech for Apartheid has been organizing demonstrations against Google and Amazon since they won the Nimbus bid in 2021. Employees had issued a public letter against the project, and at a 2022 Alphabet stockholders meeting, a proposal to reexamine involvement with Nimbus was rejected.
In March, then-Google employee Eddie Hatfield was fired after interrupting Google Israel CEO Barak Regev at a New York City Israeli technology conference.