On April 18 (local time), Google fired 28 employees for participating in protests against the company's cloud contract with the Israeli government .
Parent company Alphabet said some protesting employees broke into and disrupted work at several unspecified offices.
“Imposing work restrictions on other employees and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies and is completely unacceptable behavior,” Alphabet said in a statement.
The company added that it had concluded individual investigations, which resulted in the termination of 28 Google employees, and vowed to continue to expand the investigation and take action if necessary.
28 Google employees fired for protesting Israeli cloud contract. (Photo: Reuters)
In a statement on Medium, Google employees affiliated with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign said some employees who were not directly involved in the protests were also among those fired by Google.
“Google employees have the right to peacefully protest our terms and conditions of employment ,” the workers group added.
The protesters claim that Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract awarded to Google and Amazon in 2021 to provide cloud services to the Israeli government, is supporting the development of military tools by the Israeli government.
For its part, Google asserts that the Nimbus contract " does not target top secret, classified, or military workloads related to weapons or intelligence services."
This isn’t the first time workers have protested against Google. In 2018, employees successfully pushed the company to drop a contract with the US military, Project Maven, to analyze drone imagery with potential applications in warfare.
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