Advocacy
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April 29, 2024
We have actually been requiring that Google cut its ties to Israel’s apartheid federal government for several years, and we’re not stopping now.
Previously this month, the 3 people, in addition to lots of our colleagues, participated in a collaborated set of civil resistance actions at Google workplaces around the United States. Some employees inhabited Google’s New York workplaces. Others inhabited the Sunnyvale, California, workplace of Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud.
This demonstration was an escalation of the continuous No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA) project, which has actually been requiring for many years that Google and Amazon cancel Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion offer that Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services signed with the Israeli military and federal government in 2021. The agreement offers cloud computing and AI innovation for Israel’s apartheid state, adding to state violence and now to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The day after the demonstrations, we discovered that Google had actually fired 30 people, consisting of those not actively part of the sit-ins. The following Monday, we found out that Google fired an extra 20 employeesconsisting of non-participating onlookers.
Google claims everybody fired had actually been “straight associated with disruptive activity,” however its management has yet to even offer a precise count for the variety of employees affected by its retaliation. We have actually needed to count on a self-reported count from employees themselves. We are dissatisfied, annoyed, and discouraged by Google’s rejection to engage with us.
We took part in this demonstration due to the fact that we might see all too plainly how our daily work at Google was assisting and abetting Israel’s continuous genocide in Gaza. As tech employees, we see how Google, like Meta and other tech corporations, has actually engaged double requirements by permitting Zionists to promote atrocity propaganda while concurrently reducing Palestinian voices. (This pattern of censorship long precedes the existing war) We have actually been distressed to see our own imagination, development, and love of innovation be utilized for warfare.
Much of our colleagues asked to be reassigned to various jobs or took leaves in weak efforts to distance ourselves from Project Nimbus and other military agreements. We likewise attempted to engage our leaders with petitions, through workplace hour conferences, at business city center, and through internal message boards and worker groups. Rather of engaging with us in great faith, our management averted our issues, targeted messages that revealed assistance for Palestine or opposition to the genocide, and censored our internal interactions networkThese actions have actually especially affected our Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab coworkers, who are dealing with an internal culture of hate, abuse, and retaliation. Eventually, we felt we had no option however to unite and interrupt company as typical in order to make our needs heard.
We ‘d like to restate those needs:
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