California: Google fired at least 20 more workers this week for participating in recent protests against the company’s work in Israel, Los Angeles Times reported.
This takes the total number number of terminated employees to more than 50, according to the No Tech for Apartheid Campaign, the advocacy group that organised the sit-ins.
Google issued a statement, confirming the development and saying that it did as a result of its investigation into the protests.
“Our investigation into these events is now concluded, and we have terminated the employment of additional employees who were found to have been directly involved in disruptive activity,” the company said. “To reiterate, every single one of those whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings. We carefully confirmed and reconfirmed this.”
However, the protest group alleged that Google terminated some of the people who didn’t participate directly in the events.
“Google is throwing a tantrum because the company’s executives are embarrassed about the strength workers showed at last Tuesday’s historic sit-ins, as well as their botched response to them,” No Tech for Apartheid Campaign said in a statement. “Now, the corporation is lashing out at any worker that was physically in the vicinity of the protest — including those who were not at all involved in the campaign.”
The protest seeks the company to drop its cloud computing contract with the Israeli government and military, called Project Nimbus. The protest group demands Google to drop the project, protect Palestinian, Arab and Muslim employees and reinstate the workers who were terminated.