Google fires more workers over in-office protests
Google has completed a second round of terminations linked to the anti-Israel demonstrations held at the tech giant's offices last week.
After protesters took over Google's corporate offices in New York, Seattle and Sunnyvale, California, on April 16 in 10-hour sit-ins, the company fired 28 workers the next day. This week, they fired more following an investigation into the incidents.
According to "No Tech for Apartheid," the activist campaign led by tech workers behind the protests, a total of 50 Google employees have now been let go by the company over the sit-ins.
No Tech for Apartheid claimed in a blog post that some of the fired Google workers were "non-participating bystanders during last week’s protests."
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Google confirmed in a statement to FOX Business on Tuesday that the company fired more workers linked to the demonstrations, and insisted those who were terminated were participants.
"We continued our investigation into the physical disruption inside our buildings on April 16, looking at additional details provided by coworkers who were physically disrupted, as well as those employees who took longer to identify because their identity was partly concealed–like by wearing a mask without their badge–while engaged in the disruption," a Google spokesperson said.
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"Our investigation into these events is now concluded, and we have terminated the employment of additional employees who were found to have been directly involved in disruptive activity," the statement continued. "To reiterate, every single one of those whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings. We carefully confirmed and reconfirmed this."
Several demonstrators were arrested after the April 16 sit-ins, after they occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurianto to read their list of demands, including that Google cut off all ties to Israel and cancel Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud-computing and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli government.
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No Tech for Apartheid claims the Israeli miliary will use Google technology for "genocidal means."
Google has denied that its Nimbus project is assisting Israel with weapons or intelligence services, and demonstrators conceded that there was no proof that Project Nimbus was being used against the civilian population in Gaza.
Following the protests and the first round of terminations, Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the matter in a message to remaining employees, making it clear that such disruptions would not be tolerated.
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"We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That's important to preserve," Pichai wrote. "But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics."