After firing 28 employees last week owing to sit-in protests at Google’s offices in New York and California, the company reportedly fired more than 20 employees, as per a report by The Verge. The employees were protesting Google’s $1.2 billion cloud computing project with the Israeli government Project Nimbus. A spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid, Jane Chung, said that Google has fired ‘non-participating bystanders’ according to the report. With this, the total number of employees fired for staging protests has now gone up to almost 50, according to the report.
What we know about Google protests?
Several Google employees protested at the company’s offices, which resulted in nine of them being arrested, as earlier reported. Following this, Google’s head of security, Chris Rackow, sent a memo condemning the demonstrations and said, ‘This behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made coworkers feel threatened.’ Google investigated the incident and terminated the employment of 28 employees, he had then said.
He added, “If you’re one of the few tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again.”
What Sundar Pichai said on the protests?
Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned employees that the company has an open culture where debate and discussions are encouraged, but there are limitations to such activities. He said, “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.”
“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 spokesperson for the company told, “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. 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.”
