Tuesday 16 April, some employees of Google they basted one protest internal to the company premises in order to ask your employer to renounce some important orders signed with Israel. The demonstration lasted about 10 hours and touched offices in New York, Seattle and Sunnyvale, so the company called the police and arrests were made.
The details of the matter still remain partially ambiguous, since the reconstruction of the events relies on two sources whose positions are poles apart: on the one hand there is the movement No Tech for Apartheid, who supervised and documented the act of protest, on the other hand there is the company itself, which instead has an interest in downsizing the entire event. According to Jane Chung, spokesperson for the protest, there would still have been at least nine arrests. However, it is not clear whether all the detainees actually worked for the technology giant.
During the demonstration, a handful of Google employees were in fact joined by a substantial number of external activists. In unison, the two currents called for Big Tech’s termination military contractsa battle that No Tech for Apartheid links directly to the project Nimbusa $1.2 billion deal in which the tech firm committed to providing Israel with cloud and artificial intelligence systems.
The episode is but the most recent example of the multiple protest actions that have taken place internally at Google. Only at the beginning of March did the company fire the IT engineer Eddie Hatfield, who had the temerity to interrupt a presentation by the CEO of Israeli Affairs to announce his refusal “to build technology that supports genocide.” At the same time, Big Tech deleted the contents of a message board internal to the company where employees had begun to express their opinions in relation to the controversial military contracts signed with Israel. Google had considered i posts removed as “divisive”, capable of being “destructive to our workplace”.
As for the recent arrest, the company fully believes it was right. “Physically impeding other employees’ work and blocking their access to facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and we will investigate and take appropriate action,” a Google spokesperson said. “These employees they had been placed on administrative leave and had his access to our systems revoked. After refusing to leave multiple times, police officers were contacted to remove them in order to ensure the safety of the office.
[di Walter Ferri]
