Google Fires Nearly 30 Employees Over Pro-Palestinian Sit-In

Google fired 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the company's New York and California offices earlier this week. 

The protesters demanded Google dissociate with the Israeli government and defense ministry, with whom the tech company has a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud services.

The pro-Palestinian staffers wore traditional Arab headscarves during their storming and occupation of the office of a top executive in California on Tuesday and were terminated on Wednesday after an internal investigation, the New York Post reported, citing a memo from Google vice president of global security Chris Rackow.

Protesters wore T-shirts that read "Google against Genocide" and plastered a poster outside of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office that read "Drop Nimbus," the Post said. Nimbus is a reference to the cloud services contract. 

The protesters, several of whom are affiliated with a group called "No Tech For Apartheid," posted videos of their demonstrations on social media. They live-streamed their arrest:

The sit-in comes days after Time Magazine posted an article naming and shaming Google for its partnership with the Israel Defense Ministry. As we argued last Friday, Time sought to incite an uprising within Google.

Mission accomplished.

Rackow released the following memo to staffers on Thursday, as reported by the Post:

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 co-workers 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.

Chris