Former Google employees terminated for protesting collaboration with Israel retaliate against tech giant
Former Google employees who were terminated after staging an office sit-in to protest the company’s contract with Israel have taken legal action. They filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, citing violations of their labor rights. The workers are seeking reinstatement, back pay, and a commitment from Google to respect their right to organize. Former Google employees, fired for protesting the company’s Israel contract through an office sit-in, have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. They allege labor rights violations and demand job reinstatement, back pay, and assurance of their right to organize. The workers aim to hold Google accountable for their actions.
The workers fired from Google for staging an office sit-in to protest the company’s contract with Israel have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging the company violated their labor rights by terminating them.
The workers in the complaint are demanding their jobs be reinstated with back pay and the company release a statement saying it will not violate workers’ rights to organize. In an email the day after the sit-ins, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said work is not the place to debate politics, but the protesters argued in the lawsuit they were discussing working conditions, including the fact that the company has a $1.2 billion contract with Israel, not politics.
“This is a very clear case of employees disrupting and occupying work spaces, and making other employees feel threatened and unsafe,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
“By any standard, their behavior was completely unacceptable — and widely seen as such. We carefully confirmed and reconfirmed that every single person whose employment was terminated was directly and definitively involved in disruption inside our buildings. We are confident in our position and stand by the actions we’ve taken.”
One of the workers contacted by the Washington Post says he did not help organize the protest and only stopped by to watch the event until a security guard asked for his badge. He later received an email from Google saying that “he’d been fired for violating Google’s code of conduct and harassing employees.”
In a document obtained by the outlet, workers say Google violated their rights “by terminating and/or placing them on administrative leave in response to their protected concerted 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.”
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The lawsuit alleges Google fired 50 employees following the sit-in in early April, in which workers were protesting Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract awarded to the company and Amazon to supply the Israeli government with cloud services.
Some workers were taking part in a No Tech for Apartheid campaign, which aims to cut the tech giants off from Israeli funding and has taken Gaza’s side in the Israel-Hamas war.
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