Google fires additional employees following protests targeting Israeli government contract
Google confirmed Tuesday morning that it has fired additional employees for being involved in protests at the tech company's Sunnyvale and New York City offices to oppose a $1.2 billion contract with Israel amid the war in Gaza.
Approximately 20 more employees were fired following sit-in protests at Google facilities on April 16, bringing the total of workers let go to more than 50.
The workers demanded that Google drop its Project Nimbus, a joint contract between Google and Amazon to provide cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and other technology services to the Israeli government.
The advocacy group No Tech for Apartheid claims that Project Nimbus makes it easier for the Israeli government and its military to surveil Palestinians and force them off their land in Gaza. Google has said Nimbus isn't being deployed in weaponry or intelligence gathering.
Some employees say many of the fired workers did not even enter the company offices during the demonstrations. A Google spokesperson told CBS News Bay Area the terminated employees were personally and definitively involved in the disruption.
"As we indicated, 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," said the spokesperson in an emailed statement.."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. 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."
Nine people were arrested during the protests last week in which workers were seen in Google offices holding placards and sitting on the floor, chanting slogans.