Google fired 28 employees who protested its cloud deal with Israel

Google has fired 28 employees who participated in the protests against the Project Nimbusa cloud contract from 1.2 billion dollars with the Israeli government which also includes Amazon.

The agreement raised the fear that technology provided by the Nimbus Project can be used by the Israeli security apparatuspotentially contributing to harm the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank.

The dismissal occurred after that 9 employees were arrested for protesting in the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in Sunnyvale, California, and at a company office in New York. All nine arrested workers and the other nineteen protest participants were fired. These departures follow an earlier firing related to the same project last month.

Google spokeswoman Anna Kowalczyk said that employees were fired for obstructing the work of others and for refusing to leave the premisesforcing the intervention of the police.

According to Kowalczyk, the Nimbus contract was not for classified or military work. The protests coincided with demonstrations of more than 100 people outside Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle, in which a small number of Google workers also participated.

Jane Chung of No Tech for Apartheid He recalled that some fired workers were involved in less provocative actions, such as participating in outdoor protests or distributing safety leaflets. Google’s decision has been called a “retaliatory act.”

Zelda Montes, a former YouTube software engineer, criticized Google for allegedly violating legal worker protections in the United States and retaliating against employees involved in peaceful protests. There Google locationas stated by Kowalczyk, is that the contract relating to the Nimbus Project it is not intended for “weapons or intelligence” related workloads.