Google fired 28 workers on April 17 after dozens of employees participated in sit-ins at the company’s offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, Calif., to protest a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. Nine were arrested at the company headquarters in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood after they refused police orders to disband their occupation. Another five were arrested at the Sunnyvale headquarters. Tensions had been building between management and activist employees over Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint Google-Amazon deal to supply the Israeli government with cloud services, including artificial intelligence. Google employees affiliated with the group that organized the sit-ins, No Tech for Apartheid, said in a statement that the firings were “a flagrant act of retaliation.”
“We did not come to Google to work on technology that kills. By engaging in this contract leadership has betrayed our trust, our AI Principles, and our humanity,” Billy Van Der Laar, a Sunnyvale-based software engineer, told reporters at the action. (NYT, The Village Sun, The Verge, The Forward, KTVU)
The use of artificial intelligence to generate potential targets appears to have contributed to the destructive nature of the current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by progressive Israeli website +972 recently revealed.
See our last report on the politics of Google.
Photo: Q Sakamaki/The Village Sun
Google fires more employees over protests
Google has fired an additional 20 workers that it says were involved in protests last week over the company’s cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government, bringing the total number of workers fired to 50, according to the group organizing the actions. (CNN)