Google is being criticized by its own employees after making 50 redundancies due to internal protests against a contract with Israel. The protests took place at offices in New York and Sunnyvale and were organized by No Tech for Apartheid, a coalition of Google and Amazon employees who are against the 1.2 billion dollar contract between the two tech giants and Israel.
The employees believe that the contract, known as Project Nimbus, will give Benjamin Netanyahu's government even more tools to surveil Palestinian civilians and maintain the illegal occupation.
In response, Google initially fired 28 workers, with more than 20 more being laid off a few days later, marking the biggest redundancy incident at the company since the latest escalation of violence between Hamas and Israel began on October 7, 2023, explains The Guardian.
Michael Sainato
Emaan Haseem, a software engineer and organizer with No Tech for Apartheid who was fired, accuses Google of ignoring the protesters' concerns about transparency and ethical conduct.
"Google overreacted and attacked 50 workers over this contract instead of being more transparent or trying to prove that they are not providing military resources to the Israelis to aid their genocide and continue their apartheid. They had the full option to do this, but instead they chose to throw a tantrum and cash in on 50 workers, many of whom were not involved in the demonstration," he accuses.
The dismissals have caused significant financial instability for the affected workers, although Haseem noted that they have received substantial support from colleagues and the wider community. The workers also believe that the media frenzy surrounding the protests and the dismissals has inadvertently helped to give more attention to the campaign against the Nimbus Project.
Hasan Ibraheem, another dismissed Google software engineer, highlighted the abrupt and impersonal nature of the dismissals, which were communicated en masse by email. "We don't want our work to be used to aid genocide," he argues.
Google's spokesperson defended the company's actions, saying that the dismissals were the result of an in-depth investigation into the protests, which they described as physically disruptive. "Our investigation into these events is now complete and we have terminated the employment of additional employees who were found to be directly involved in disruptive activities," he argues
The spokesperson also clarified the nature of Project Nimbus, ensuring that it involves non-sensitive workloads in its commercial cloud in accordance with its terms of service, and is not intended for military or intelligence use.
