Google fires 28 employees after sit-in protest over Israel cloud contract | Hacker News Reader

Google fires 28 employees after sit-in protest over Israel cloud contract

theverge.com

'In a memo sent to all employees on Wednesday, Chris Rackow, Google’s head of global security, said that “behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it.” You can read the full memo at the bottom of this story.'

The memo makes it clear that Google fired the employees for rule and policy violations:

"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."

Would they have been fired for protesting less aggressively?

My guess is if Google wanted to fire them for it (even if it was less aggressive) they could have.

In most countries you can go on strike, but there are rules and laws on how to do so. Doing some other form of protest (like they did) is likely going to be a violation of workplace policies in a way not protected by law.

There is an appropriate time and place for protests, but apparently these protesters weren't able to figure that out.

> “In the three years that we have been organizing against Project Nimbus, we have yet to hear from a single executive about our concerns,” the group wrote in a post on Medium.

Are you sure they weren't?

While it would have been decent of Google to formulate a reply, in the end it's a business decision. This is not about workers rights such as pay, etc. If you don't like the direction of a company and they don't want to change (or don't care), join a company whose values align with your own.

Well the company is not a monolithic entity, it is after all a group of people. Is it unreasonable to expect them to change a particular policy, in this case supporting genocide , could be changed from within? After all it was decided to pursue by some execs, and it is jot that hard to withdrawfrom it. It is not the core business of Google. We are not talking about Googlers protesting about the Google Ads.

> Well the company is not a monolithic entity, it is after all a group of people.

A group of people...in a clearly defined structure. In Google's case that structure is a hierarchy. The issue passed through this structure and a decision was made. Now even hierarchical companies often have some mechanism to make appeals based on ethics, safety, etc. but either this wasn't done or their appeals were rejected.

> After all it was decided to pursue by some execs, and it is jot that hard to withdrawfrom it

Mr Pichai was probably at the very least aware of a billion dollar contract I would guess. If they wanted to withdraw from it, they would have done so.

> It is not the core business of Google.

I think Google would like very much to succeed in the cloud. A billion dollar cloud contract will certainly help with that.

Biggest discussion:[0](89 points, 2 hours ago, 74 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40072295

I get the whole, "leave politics out of work" but 37signals wasn't selling Basecamp to Israel defense services. How many degrees between your work product and the killing of another human is too few? I do sometimes wonder at what point do we become culpable (like 1940s IBM).

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40072295

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40060532

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