A week after firing 28 employees for sit-in protests, Google has laid off at least 20 more from its workforce for protesting the company’s deal with Israel amid its conflict with Palestine, The Verge reported.
The employees were reportedly protesting Google’s $1.2 billion cloud computing project – Project Nimbus – with the Israeli government
With these layoffs, the total number of employees fired for protesting Project Nimbus has now gone up to almost 50, the report said.
According to The Verge report, Jane Chung, a spokesperson for ‘No Tech for Apartheid’ said that the tech giant fired “non-participating bystanders”.
Reports said that nine of Google employees protesting in office premises were arrested earlier.
Soon after, Google’s head of security Chris Rackow condemned the demonstrations saying that their behaviour was unacceptable, disruptive, and made coworkers feel threatened. On investigating the incident, Google terminated the employment of 28 employees.
If you’re one of the few tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” he said.
What did Sundar Pichai said on the protesting employees?
Sundar Pichai warned its employees saying that the company has an open culture where debate and discussions are encouraged but there are limitations to the same.
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,” the Google CEO said.
“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,” he added.
A Google spokesperson also told Hindustan Times that every single one of those whose were fired were “personally and definitively” involved in disruptive activity inside office buildings.
“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,” the spokesperson said.
“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,” they added.
