A hot potato: Several former Google employees who were fired from the company for protesting against its cloud contract with the Israeli government have filed a complaint with the US labor board. The workers claim Google’s termination of their contracts was illegal.
Nine Google employees were arrested last month after occupying the company’s offices in New York and California for an eight-hour sit-in. They were protesting against the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract with the Israeli government for Google and Amazon’s cloud services.
Google initially put the nine workers on administrative leave, eventually firing 28 employees whom it claimed were connected to the protests, and threatened further action against the “extremely disruptive” protestors if necessary. Google said their conduct was completely unacceptable and made other workers feel unsafe.
A complaint filed to the National Labor Relations Board claims that Google “retaliated against approximately 50 employees” by terminating them or putting them on administrative leave.
The single-page complaint claims that Google was responding to their participation in a peaceful, non-disruptive protest, and that by firing them, the company interfered with their rights under US labor law to advocate for better working conditions.
The protesters claim Project Nimbus will allow the Israeli government to surveil and displace Palestinians while supporting the development of military applications. Google refutes these claims, insisting that Nimbus is not related to highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.
It’s not just Google employees who are angry about Project Nimbus. Around 1,700 Amazon employees signed a petition against the deal last year, according to the Washington Post.
One of the former employees fired by Google says he was dismissed just for watching the demonstration. He told The Verge that he went to the 10th floor of Google’s New York City office around lunchtime to check out the protest.
“When I got there, there were probably 20-ish people sitting on the floor. I didn’t talk to any of them, I talked to folks who were standing up, passing out flyers, doing other roles,” he said. The anonymous worker returned to his desk and later revisited the protest around 5 pm, chatting with people for “maybe four minutes.” Google terminated his contract the following day.
The protests bring to mind Google’s Project Maven from 2018, in which the company worked with the US Department of Defense to develop drone footage-analyzing AI. It led to over 3,100 employees sending a strongly worded letter to CEO Sundar Pichai demanding Google leave the project, which it eventually did.
