Google announced on Thursday that it has let go of 28 workers after some of them took part in demonstrations against the Israeli government’s cloud contract.
A tiny number of protesting employees entered and interfered with work at a few unidentified office sites, according to the Alphabet, opens new tab unit.
“Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior,” the company said in a statement.
Google announced that it had completed individual investigations, leading to the dismissal of 28 workers, and that it will carry out additional research and take further action as required.
Google employees connected to the No Tech for Apartheid campaign termed it a “flagrant act of retaliation” and claimed that some of the employees Google fired were not directly involved in Tuesday’s protests in a message that opens a new tab on Medium.
“Google workers have the right to peacefully protest about terms and conditions of our labor,” the statement added.
The group voicing protests claims that Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract given to Google and Amazon to provide cloud services to the Israeli government, opens a new tab in 2021 and encourages the Israeli government’s development of military tools.
Google defended the Nimbus contract in its statement, saying that it “is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
