Good riddance: Google boots 28 pro-Hamas employees who staged disruptive anti-Israel protest
In an unexpected show of corporate backbone, Google gave the boot to 28 employees who staged a screamingly loud, disruptive, vandalism-filled protest at Google's New York and Sunnyvale offices over their hate for Israel.
According to CNN:
London CNN —Google has fired more than two dozen employees who protested this week against the company’s cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.
The workers were dismissed after an investigation found that they had staged protests inside Google’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California. In Sunnyvale, they entered the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, according to a post on X by the group that organized the demonstration, No Tech For Apartheid.
Protesters held banners that read “No More Genocide For Profit” and “We Stand with Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Googlers.”
BREAKING—DOZENS OF @GOOGLE WORKERS LEAD HISTORIC COAST TO COAST-INS AT @GOOGLECLOUD CEO THOMAS KURIAN’S OFFICE IN SUNNYVALE & @GOOGLE’s NYC 10TH FLOOR COMMONS. They refuse to leave until @google stops powering the genocide in Gaza
— No Tech For Apartheid (@NoTechApartheid) April 16, 2024
LIVESTREAM: https://t.co/uUiPbr3oDz pic.twitter.com/vCkInh0769
The Jew-haters lost typically six-figure jobs associated with Google and access to Google's sybaritic employee playpens with all their paintball rooms, guitar studios, LEGOs, beanbag chairs, and free food. No more of that for them. Hopefully, Hamas can help them find something they like better in Gaza over the tunnels. Smart trade, bozos.
But Google had good reasons for getting rid of them.
According to The Verge, citing a communication from Google's head of global security, Chris Rackow, to all employees:
They took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers. Their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made coworkers feel threatened. We placed employees involved under investigation and cut their access to our systems. Those who refused to leave were arrested by law enforcement and removed from our offices.
So they trashed the fancy headquarters amid all their screaming and yelling? What jackasses.
In a blog post noted by Aljazeera, CEO Sundar Pichit added:
“We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That’s important to preserve. But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Pichai said. “This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted.”
Google's Rackow emphasized that the place was a business, too:
Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it. It clearly violates multiple policies that all employees must adhere to — including our Code of Conduct and Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, Retaliation, Standards of Conduct, and Workplace Concerns.
We are a place of business and every Googler is expected to read our policies and apply them to how they conduct themselves and communicate in our workplace. The overwhelming majority of our employees do the right thing. If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again. The company takes this extremely seriously, and we will continue to apply our longstanding policies to take action against disruptive behavior — up to and including termination.
The protest was over a $1.2 billion cloud contract Google had signed with Israel several years earlier (with Amazon) called Project Nimbus. The protestors wanted Google to flush that money down the toilet and come join them for some virtue-signaling.
Hear how the group that got the boot, "No Tech for Apartheid" (which seems to be geographically as well as time-challenged) is whining now, according to AlJazeera:
"This flagrant act of retaliation is a clear indication that Google values its $1.2 billion contract with the genocidal Israeli government and military more than its own workers. In the three years that we have been organising against Project Nimbus, we have yet to hear from a single executive about our concerns,” it said in a statement posted on Medium.
I visited Google’s office in Tel Aviv where about 50 people work in the Marketing & Sales team and over 200 in the engineers department. Yes, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google founders, are Jewish. However, this post has no religious orientation. If you are looking for some sort of religious conspiracy theory go elsewhere, here you will learn only about what Google is really up to in Israel.
Google first opened its office in Israel in 2006. I visited two of the four floors used by Google on the 21st and 22nd floors of the famous Levinstein Tower in downtown Tel Aviv. Although not as impressive as the famed Googleplex in Mountain View, California, the offices offer magnificent views of the Mediterranean sea. Each room has its own theme, with walls and furnishings of all colors. There is a meeting room filled with giant legos, a pinball machine, Nintendo Wii, Playstation and other games. There is also a fully equipped music room with guitars, drums, microphones, professional sound system, etc. Add to that a silent room, a 3D printer, and free food at each floor. The feeling of being in a kindergarten almost made me forget that I was in one of the world’s largest multinational companies.
Google also employs about 80 engineers in its second office in Israel located in Haifa, Israel’s technological center.
When asked about the main differences between the Tel Aviv office and the Paris office or any other Google office worldwide regarding the Sales & Marketing teams, the answer was, “Besides cultural differences, the view in the office!” They quickly added that the special ingredient and main reason why Google has such an important R&D center in Israel is because of the quality of Israeli engineers.