Read Google’s memo to employees after firing staff for protesting its cloud contract with Israel
Google fired 28 employees late Wednesday after staffers led a series of protests against the company’s cloud computing and AI services contract with the Israeli government amid its war in Gaza.
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The demonstrations were staged in response to the company’s $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon, Project Nimbus, which has been ongoing since 2021. Led by action group No Tech For Apartheid, the protests took place across Google offices in New York, Seattle, and Sunnyvale, California on Tuesday. New York and Sunnyvale employees held a near-10 hour sit-in at the offices in those cities, including one in Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian’s office, and nine were arrested on trespassing charges on Tuesday evening.
The protests Tuesday join other cases of Google staffers speaking out against the company’s contract with the Israeli government. In August, Jewish Google employee Ariel Koren penned a letter to fellow employees saying she was leaving the company and alleged it retaliated against her and other employees who had spoken out in support of Palestine. And in March, Google fired a Google Cloud engineer who protested against Project Nimbus during a keynote speech by Barak Regev, managing director of Google Israel.
On Wednesday, Google head of security Chris Rackow, sent a memo to employees about the protests and warned them to “think again” if they think the company will overlook similar conduct.
Read the memo Rackow sent below:
Googlers,
You may have seen reports of protests at some of our offices yesterday. Unfortunately, a number of employees brought the event into our buildings in New York and Sunnyvale. They took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers. Their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made coworkers feel threatened. We placed employees involved under investigation and cut their access to our systems. Those who refused to leave were arrested by law enforcement and removed from our offices.
Following investigation, today we terminated the employment of twenty-eight employees found to be involved. We will continue to investigate and take action as needed.
Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it. It clearly violates multiple policies that all employees must adhere to — including our Code of Conduct and Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, Retaliation, Standards of Conduct, and Workplace Concerns.
We are a place of business and every Googler is expected to read our policies and apply them to how they conduct themselves and communicate in our workplace. The overwhelming majority of our employees do the right thing. If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again. The company takes this extremely seriously, and we will continue to apply our longstanding policies to take action against disruptive behavior — up to and including termination.
You should expect to hear more from leaders about standards of behavior and discourse in the workplace.
