Google workers fired for Israel contract protests claim terminations were illegal

• Google employees who were fired for protesting the company’s work with Israel have gone to the NLRB.
• About 50 employees were fired or placed on leave, the NLRB complaint said.
• Google previously said that the protesters’ conduct was “unacceptable” and “extremely disruptive.”

Google workers who were fired for protesting against the company’s cloud contract with the Israeli government filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board on Monday.

An attorney for the workers said in the complaint that Google “retaliated against approximately 50 employees” by terminating them or putting them on administrative leave. Last month, Google said that it fired 28 employees for staging in-office protests in New York City and Sunnyvale, California.

Google’s actions, the workers’ attorney wrote, were “in response to their protected concert activity, namely, participation (or perceived participation) in a peaceful, non-disruptive protest that was directly and explicitly connected to their terms and conditions of work.”

In a statement to Business Insider, a Google spokesperson said the behavior was “completely unacceptable.”

“This is a very clear case of employees disrupting and occupying work spaces, and making other employees feel threatened and unsafe,” the statement said. “We carefully confirmed and reconfirmed that every single person whose employment was terminated was directly and definitively involved in disruption inside our buildings.”

Representatives for the NLRB didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

Google said in an internal memo on April 17 that the protesters had taken over office spaces and defaced company property.

“Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it,” the company wrote.

The workers had voiced their dissent against Project Nimbus, Google’s $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon to provide artificial intelligence and cloud computing services to Israel.

Protesters claimed that the contract — the details of which became public in 2021 — would allow the Israeli government to surveil and displace Palestinians.

But Google told BI last month that the company’s work was not directed at highly sensitive or classified military projects relevant to weapons or intelligence services.

“We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy,” a spokesperson for Google told BI.

The ongoing dispute between Google and some of its employees highlights companies’ tricky balance between their business interests and their workers’ desire for self-expression.

In December, The Washington Post reported that around 1,700 Amazon employees had signed a petition against Project Nimbus.

Signatories argued that Amazon’s cloud technology was going to be used by the Israelis to “repress Palestinian activists and impose a brutal siege on Gaza.”

When asked about the petition, Amazon spokesperson Rob Munoz told The Post that the tech giant “is focused on making the benefits of our world-leading cloud technology available to all our customers, wherever they are located.”