(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Former far-left Google employees filed a federal labor complaint against the Big Tech company on Apr. 29, 2024, saying they were illegally fired for protesting Google’s partnership with the Israeli government and asking for better working conditions.
The complaint that was filed with the National Labor Relations Board stated Google violated the rights of the ex-employees “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,” the National Review reported.
The former Google workers staged sit-ins on Apr. 16, 2024, to protest Google and Amazon’s $1.2 billion contract with Israel, Project Nimbus, which provides cloud computing and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli government.
In the end, police arrested at least nine protesters and fired at least 28 employees a day later, with an additional 20 firings coming the following week. The news source reported that approximately 50 workers were terminated.
“This is a very clear case of employees disrupting and occupying work spaces, and making other employees feel threatened and unsafe. By any standard, their behavior was completely unacceptable — and widely seen as such,” a Google spokesperson said.
The spokesperson then doubled down on Google’s decision and said that the company “carefully confirmed and reconfirmed that every single person whose employment was terminated was directly and definitively involved in disruption inside our buildings.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai also previously said Google employees shouldn’t use the workplace to “fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.”
However, the far-left workers argued that they were justified to be activists instead of employees.
“That’s legally protected activity. Sundar can say he doesn’t want that, but the National Labor Relations Act says otherwise. Google is probably the most powerful company in the world and the work the workers do every day has an incredible impact. To pretend it’s objective and you can’t talk about the effects of that is absurd,” an anonymous software engineer who was fired said.
