Google said Thursday that it had fired 28 employees after some of them participated in protests against the company’s cloud contract with the Israeli government.
The Alphabet unit said a small number of protesting employees entered and disrupted work at some unspecified offices.
“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 said it had concluded individual investigations, which resulted in the dismissal of 28 employees, and that it would continue to investigate and take necessary action.
In a statement on Medium, Google workers affiliated with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign called it a “blatant act of retaliation” and said some employees who were not directly involved in Tuesday’s protests were also among those fired from Google. .
“Google workers have the right to peacefully protest the terms and conditions of our work,” the statement added.
The Protestant faction says that Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract awarded to Google and Amazon.com in 2021 to supply cloud services to the Israeli government, supports the Israeli government’s development of military tools.
In its statement, Google maintained that the Nimbus contract “is not directed at military, classified or highly sensitive workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
Protests at Google are not new. In 2018, workers successfully pressured the company to shelve a contract with the U.S. military, Project Maven, aimed at analyzing aerial drone footage with potential application in warfare.