Google and Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai arrives at the federal courthouse in Washington, Monday, Oct. 30, 2023.
Jose Luis Magana | AP
Google terminated 28 employees Wednesday, according to an internal memo viewed by CNBC, after a series of protests against labor conditions and the company’s contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.
The news comes one day after nine Google workers were arrested on trespassing charges Tuesday night after staging a sit-in at the company’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, including a protest in Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office.
Some of the arrested workers in New York and Sunnyvale, who spoke with CNBC earlier Wednesday, said that during the protest they were locked out of their work accounts and offices, placed on administrative leave and told to wait to return to work until being contacted by human resources.
On Wednesday evening, a memo sent by Chris Rackow, Google’s vice president of global security, told Googlers that “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.”
The arrests, which were livestreamed on Twitch by participants, follow rallies outside Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle, which attracted hundreds of attendees, according to workers involved. The protests were led by the “No Tech For Apartheid” organization, focused on Project Nimbus — Google and Amazon’s joint $1.2 billion contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing services, including AI tools, data centers and other cloud infrastructure.
“This evening, Google indiscriminately fired over two dozen workers, including those among us who did not directly participate in yesterday’s historic, bicoastal 10-hour sit-in protests,” No Tech For Apartheid said in a statement, adding, “In the three years that we have been organizing against Project Nimbus, we have yet to hear from a single executive about our concerns. Google workers have the right to peacefully protest about terms and conditions of our labor. These firings were clearly retaliatory.”
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Protesters in Sunnyvale sat in Kurian’s office for more than nine hours until their arrests, writing demands on Kurian’s whiteboard and wearing shirts that read “Googler against genocide.” In New York, protesters sat in a three-floor common space. Five workers from Sunnyvale and four from New York were arrested.
“On a personal level, I am opposed to Google taking any military contracts — no matter which government they’re with or what exactly the contract is about,” Cheyne Anderson, a Google Cloud software engineer based in Washington, told CNBC earlier Wednesday. “And I hold that opinion because Google is an international company and no matter which military it’s with, there are always going to be people on the receiving end … represented in Google’s employee base and also our user base.” Anderson had flown to Sunnyvale for the protest in Kurian’s office and was one of the workers arrested Tuesday.