Close on the heels of warning employees about the repercussions of violating office policies, Google has fired 20 more employees. These terminations are in addition to the earlier 28.
Last week, 28 employees were asked to leave because they participated in protests at the company’s offices in New York and California, expressing their disapproval of Google working with the Israel government on a project. The protests have not gone down well with Google as the led to a lot of disruption.
Following this, Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google had made it clear to the employees that although the company promotes an open work culture where employees are free to voice their opinions and hold discussions, they have to be mindful of the limitations and avoid overstepping. He had conveyed that the employees are expected to concentrate on being productive and not waste time on protests and staging demonstrations.
This is not the first time that Google is collaborating with a government on a project. Employees have often raised their voices about the deals that the company enters into with various governments. However, Project Nimbus has caused Googlers to protest for some time now. The project is a deal between the Israel government and Amazon and Google, wherein the two companies offer cloud services solutions to the former’s military. The deal is worth $1.2billion for the two companies. Back in 2021, when the deal was signed, about 400 employees working for the two tech giants had signed an open letter to their respective senior leadership teams. The services include both storage and computational resources, which enable the user to train powerful artificial intelligence. The employees at both the were wary of how their technology could violate the human rights of Palestinians. They suspected that the deal would lead to systematic discrimination against the Palestinians
