Google has fired at least 20 more employees following protests over technology the company supplies to the Israeli government. the war in Gazabringing the total number of laid-off employees to more than 50, a group representing workers said.
It’s the latest sign of internal turmoil within the tech giant, centered around “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion deal signed in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud services computing and artificial intelligence.
Workers staged sit-ins last week at Google offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California. The company responded by calling the police, who made arrests.
The group organizing the protests, No Tech For Apartheid, said the company laid off 30 workers last week, higher than expected. initial 28 they announced.
Then, on Tuesday evening, Google laid off “more than 20” additional employees, “including spectators not participating in last week’s protests,” said Jane Chung, a spokeswoman for No Tech For Apartheid, without providing further figures. accurate.
“Google’s goals are clear: The company is trying to crush dissent, silence its workers, and reassert its power over them,” Chung said in a press release. “In its attempts to achieve this, Google has decided to unceremoniously and without due process disrupt the livelihoods of more than 50 of its own employees.”
Google said it fired the additional workers after its investigation collected details about colleagues who were “physically disrupted” and identified employees who used masks and did not wear their employee badges to hide their identities. The number of people fired was not specified.
The company disputed the group’s claims, saying it carefully confirmed that “each of the terminated individuals was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activities inside our buildings.”
The Mountain View, Calif., company previously signaled that more people could be laid off, with CEO Sundar Pichai saying in a blog post that employees would be kept on a tight leash as the company ramps up efforts to improve its AI technology.
