A Google spokesperson confirmed that it has fired more workers as it continues to investigate the April 16 protests, which included sit-ins at Google offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California.
The firing comes days after Chief Executive Sundar Pichai told employees in a company-wide memo not to use the company as a “personal platform” or to “discuss issues of disability or politics.”
“The corporation is trying to suppress dissent, silence its workers and reassert its power over them,” said Jane Chung, a spokeswoman for No Take for Ophthalmology, a group that has been working with the Israeli government since 2021. Google and Amazon have protested the deals.
The protests at Google are part of a wave of opposition to the US government and corporations working with the Israeli government and military. Pro-Palestinian protesters have been arrested at Yale and Columbia universities in recent days, prompting accusations of crackdown by university officials and another wave of protests at other colleges across the country. A day before the Google sit-ins, activists blocked highways, bridges and airport entrances across the US to protest the war in Gaza.
At Google, the situation has become a public battle between Google managers and fired employees. Google says the worker it fired actively disrupted its offices, while workers Rejecting the claims, some of those sacked did not even enter the company’s office on the day of the coordinated protests against the company.
Google has fired workers who have publicly criticized the company in the past, but not so many at once. For many years, Google had the reputation of being the most free and open of the big tech companies. Office culture and collaboration. The company celebrated an internal culture in which employees knew what other teams were working on and were encouraged to question leaders’ decisions.
In his memo to workers, Pichai said the company’s openness was a strength but applied to work topics, not politics.
“We have a culture of dynamic, open discussion that enables us to build amazing products and turn great ideas into action,” he said in the memo, which the company posted online. “But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business.”