Google fires 28 staff after sit-in protest against Israeli cloud deal ends in arrests Google has fired more than two dozen employees after they staged sit-ins at the web giant's offices in protest of its cloud contract with the Israeli government. The sit-in protests, organized by the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, were held on April 16 at Google's New York City office and Google Cloud HQ in Sunnyvale, …
Not sure about NY, but CA has laws about companies punishing people for their political beliefs and engaging in political activities. While it may be a bit of a stretch to apply it to this sort of activity, judges have handed down stranger rulings. Just look at virtually everything out of the 5th Circuit the past few years.
The problem was not their political activities, which could happen outside of the office space. But 10 hours of occupation of the offices is clearly anarchy. Therefore I would fire those people myself. Or, if they are really against the company policies - they should resign in protest, thus prove they are ready to pay for their believes.
Your brain language model seems overfitting. You are a proof that AI is already smarter than some supposedly educated humans, because AI can generalize and would understand the above paragraph without a problem whatsoever. Otherwise thanks for somewhat useful feedback - I long suspected my English is still not good enough.
That hardly even comes close to the definition of anarchy. Not even bedlam. Unless you're alleging that they were ransacking the building, destroying property, terrorizing other employees, etc.
And it's all well and good, sitting there from the safety of behind your keyboard, saying people should quit in protest. However, people have bills to pay, and the primary way to earn money to pay those bills is to work. I've never once worked at a company where I agree with 100% of the things they do, so if I were to resign in protest, I'd never be able to work anywhere. And if I started my own business, eventually I'd have to interact with customers or vendors who do things I don't like, and I'd have to refuse to do business with them, then I would be right back to not being able to pay my bills. If you're willing to pay these people out of your own pocket so they can stay true to their convictions, my hat's off to you, but we can't really rely on there being someone to step in like that, no strings attached.
That's not exactly what they were saying there. Their point was that resigning in protest is a way of demonstrating how much you value a certain opinion. If my employer does something I slightly oppose, I won't resign, but they can do something egregious enough that I would. Of course it comes with costs, because that's kind of the point. If standing up for my views was free and everyone did what I talked loudly enough about, we'd live in a very different world. If only my views worked that way, I think it would be a better world. If other people's, probably not. Choosing to obstruct work, whatever level of disruption it was, also comes with costs. I don't think the people who did it are surprised that Google reacted negatively to the actions, even if they disagree with it.
The point of the protest was to get the attention of the company, which succeeded, but it evidently didn't convince the company that they should change plans the way that others have. I'm guessing that is because this protest had a smaller number of people and likely, given that police were called, involved more active disruption (some other protests have been walk outs instead, for instance). They can try disputing their firing, and whether it is ruled legitimate or not will come down to exactly what they were doing in the buildings. I only read this article, so I have very few details about what that was. Google's statement alleges facts that won't be good for them if proven true, whereas theirs just says "peaceful" which is great, but not exactly the only requirement for a legally protected labor action.
Isn't it a bit boring to always pull the "antisemitism" card when far-right Likud wrongdoings are highlighted?
Aside from also being inconsistent with the objective observation that so many Israelis and Jews all over the world are also talking openly about Israel's apartheid? For instance: "Israeli author David Grossman suggests West Bank occupation has become ‘apartheid’ (Times of Israel)".
So don't call others far right when Israel political system has been dominated by Likud falcons, striking alliances with various far right small parties.
This is such an old, worn-out half-dead argument, that "Zionism equals Jewishness". It has the side-effect of demoting Jews to subhuman automatons, the sort that can only be what they have been programmed as, ie, Zionists - and is thus itself antisemitic. It's admittedly a very popular form of antisemitism, among Zionist Jews in particular.
It's a Category Error/Mistake, one of Philosophy and Logic and Computer Science profs' biggest bugbears, I suspect. It's a Category Error/Mistake of truly epic proportions, particularly when you consider a very similar category mistake, that of considering "Communism equals Jewishness" led to the death of six million European Jewish non-combatants between 1939-1945.
Consider the joys of another category error, that of confusing metric with Imperial, led to NASA losing its Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999.
Generally protesters start quietly/peacefully and get progressively louder/more disruptive until someone takes notice. I imagine things were getting kind of loud when Google called in the cops. My son is in a secular school, where the few Jewish kids are really keeping their heads down and travelling in nervous little groups between classes and the Muslim kids are making their lives very difficult. These kids aren't Israeli any more than the Muslim kids are Palestinian, and being kids they played no part in the conflict, but nobody in authority there is tackling it for what it is - bullying.
Its important to note they were fired, not laid off. In the USA if you are laid off you qualify for unemployment. If you are fired for cause you are ineligible for unemployment.
In the USA you can be immediately fired for cause in the workplace for 1) Violence, 2) Illegal possession of a weapon (firearm, stun gun), 3) Possession or use of an illegal drug, or 4) Open insubordination or refusing to work (however in most states being absent without contact or refusing to work for three days in a row from work is considered a resignation).
In the end, when you work for any company in the world you are being paid to conform to the management structure, period. If you refuse a superior's lawful work order, that's insubordination and you lose your job on the spot and some of us have seen it happen. The occupiers were told, repeatedly, by corporate superiors, to leave the space and get back to the work they were being paid to do and they refused, resulting in firing for cause.
I think the critical part here is that the protest took place on company property. As part of the protest they refused to work but it also appears to have degenerated into something more with police being called.
If they had taken time off and protested in the street they would probably have got away with it. In the UK staff can picket and protest outside the gates but not on company property. During the time they are striking they are not paid. Clearly employment law in the US vastly favours the employer and for large corporations like this even more so.
"I think the critical part here is that the protest took place on company property."
On company property, and on company time, and interfering with other employees, who were also on company time.
One woman who worked in the Seattle offices flew into California instead of going to work, and joined the protest at the California campus. At least one of the bay area news channels (KTVU) was giving her sympathetic airtime. I'd simply call her an idiot. Of course she got fired. What was she expecting, a medal?
We have created a generation of basically adult children who believe they are entitled to anything and everything that they 'demand'. Just look at the eco loonies. Everything is 'I/we demand' and stupid performative virtue signalling like gluing themselves to the road. Mostly children of relatively well off middle class families who have never been told 'no'.
A good example was last week when an 'activist' demanded that Bakersfield City Council members call for a ceasefire in Gaza or 'We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you'. She has been arrested and fired from her job. Oops!
>"fired for cause... for ...Illegal possession of a weapon (firearm, stun gun), ..."
Uhhh... Not really.
"Illegal possession" is a violation of public law. If breaking that, or any other law, impacts the employee's ability to work (ie: because they are in jail), that could certainly lead to termination. Not that much different than missing work because the employee was stuck in the drunk tank after a DUI.
The company may have an employee policy in place that forbids legally armed employees from possessing firearms while on-property / on-the-job, but that is a condition of employment and not a violation of public law resulting in criminal charges.
So termination for weapon possession would be a willful violation of company policy, which is a far more broad category beyond anything to do with weapons.
That's what happens when the government of that area invades another country, rapes and murders over 1700 of its people and kidnapped over 200.
It's the old "F around and find out", the Palestinians have no one to blame but themselves for what happened after that.
Your numbers are inaccurate. The J'Post declared the number was 1400, then mysteriously altered that to 1200, without giving any explanation. It turns out that 200 Hamas fighters had been granted Israeli Jewish citizenship posthumously, until the coroners found they were actually Hamas fighters. Thus the inelegant backtrack.
Then there's the as-yet unclarified number of Israelis actually killed by the IDF during its counterattack - we know that unless Hamas fighters have been enlisted in the IDF tank units, at least 12 of those 1200 were killed in Kibbutz Be'eri by IDF tank fire. It's that old "F around and find out" - up to half those 1200 may well owe their "deceased" status to the incompetence of the IDF. And this is the armed force that the US and the UK are so adamant about supplying with armaments? If Fiji, for example, or Kenya was in a similar situation where their armed forces quite possibly killed half the number of those they claimed were killed by insurgents, don't you think those supplying the armaments would have the decency to ask questions? It appears neither the UK nor the US has that elementary decency.
There is, depending on the locale. Just ask a bunch of Detroit homeowners whose houses have been taken over. Not much they can do aside from hire "squatter hitmen" who also move in -- squatters can't kick them out -- and make life absolute H-E-double-hockey-sticks for the squatters who leave after a time. Guaranteed results; usually takes a week.
For practical purposes, this is flat-out incorrect.
Adverse-possession laws in many states are in practice "squatters' rights" laws: they allow someone to claim legal control of real estate and improvements after living on the property for a certain length of time, in some states conditional on also paying the property taxes. In California, it's a mere 5 years.
And that's full adverse possession. In many states, squatters are difficult to evict even without obtaining possession; eviction is very difficult and may take decades.
May I remind you that the person who brought up "squatter's rights" wanted them to be applied to a fully functioning and occupied office space. That is what is known around these parts as "trespassing".
Adverse possession, in ALL states, only applies to properties that have been proven to be abandoned by the owner of record. I doubt that the go ogle office space will ever qualify.
Note that the article that you provide points at shitholes like New York, Texas and Florida (gee, whodathunkit?). And that it's not the property laws that allow this, rather it's the court system itself which allows it by their incompetence. There are no actual laws allowing such squatting, per se, rather the authorities tacitly allow it by ignoring it. Fix the courts, and the problem will go away. Especially in shitholes like New York, Texas and Florida.
You have ethical problems?
Go and work somewhere else, really.
Seriously if my large multinational employer did something egregious that I disagreed with, sure I'd make my feelings known but also if there's no sign of change, why stick around? It's a lot easier to leave...
I can't imagine it being more difficult for a Googler to find a similar job elsewhere than to change Google's course. I can't imagine it being difficult for a Googler to find a similar job elsewhere fullstop.
Instantly taking the victim mentality - if you are against anything we do, you must be an anti-semite! It's a perfect cover for everything, no one ever gets to say anything negative at all.
The *facts* are: Israel got attacked and 1,100 people died. So they attack back: they attack civilian targets *including* hospitals and kill 32,000 (so far, including women and children) and destroy entire towns. Plus disallow food and medicine deliveries.
I wouldn't exactly call that "proportional response", kiddies.
I'm sorry if you're butt-hurt about anyone saying anything, at all, negative about Israelis. I really am. But they are human and can have the same hate inside them as everyone else - just because your great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers suffered at the hands of a totalitarian regime doesn't mean that, somehow, that every Jewish individual afterwards throughout time is now god's grace on Earth. Jewish people can have as much hate in their hearts and just about anyone else on this planet, and refusing medical aid and food to hungry women and children in a war zone is never going to win you any friends.
they attack civilian targets *including* hospitals
Because Hamas (who let's not forget were voted into power by the Palestinians in Gaza) placed their paramilitary command posts, where they held hostages, in those hospitals, using the patients as human shields. All of that is in direct violation of international law.
" All of that is in direct violation of international law."
And so is openly attacking a hospital without protecting the patients
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during-armed-conflicts-what-law-says
"Where such a warning has remained unheeded, the enemy is no longer obliged to refrain from interfering with the work of a medical establishment or unit, or to take positive measures to assist it in its work. Even then, humanitarian considerations relating to the welfare of the wounded and sick being cared for in the facility may not be disregarded. They must be spared and, as far as possible, active measures for their safety taken."
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/14/gaza-unlawful-israeli-hospital-strikes-worsen-health-crisis
I'm sorry, but I will never justify the killing of civilians, women and children, under the guise of "But they made me do it!" OK, Hamas may have been hiding in the hospitals but to attack and destroy all the civilian infrastructure, with collateral casualties so flippantly dismissed, because you need to destroy your militant adversaries? No, I'm not accepting it, sorry. There are, and were, many different ways to handle this - and Israel intentionally took the most blunt baton they could find to the problem, rather than even attempt some precision surgery. They are quickly becoming the pariah of the world - when even Donald Trump admits "They [Israel] are losing the PR war", Israel has a SERIOUS problem with their ultra-nationalist agenda.
What "acts of genocide"? Spell this out for us. How is killing 1200 out of about 7 000 000 genocide? (And even then, the total number actually killed by Hamas is far from clear. And a number of the Israelis killed were servicemen and -women on active duty. Not civilians)
This post has been deleted by its author
> The question here is do you condone the acts of genocide committed by the Palestinians?
I condemn and don't condone the murderous act committed by "Hamas". Unlike you, I don't misremember the Oct 7 attack as a declaration of war by "the Palestinians".
I wonder if your racist logic also explains why you think criticizing Israel is the same as criticizing "the Jews".
Google is suffering from its own inability to tackle online manipulative propaganda. It is quite likely that majority of employees do not see it. Some of them believe it and get involved.
For example, have a look at repetitive comments under the following YouTube video. My guess is 98% of them come from bots or paid accounts. The video itself may be AI made: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEJQif_w1-g
A number of Google employees unionized back in 2021 (I think). If the fired employees were union members, Google may face legal repercussions.
Per the US Government's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB):
"All employees - union or not - have the right to participate in a protected strike, picket or protest."
There are limits and exceptions, but this is the general guideline.
The exceptions include:
- Destruction of company property - which they did (defacing the office).
- Preventing non-participating (in their protest) employees from working - which they also did.
This sort of thing gets you fired in most parts of the world.
I'm all for free speech and the right to protest, but if you play stupid games you win prizes.
An affirmative defense can be that of "hostile workplace". Some of the comments here suggest that the underlying cause is deeply polarizing and very susceptible to those biases we unknowingly operate under. Thereby the animosity here indicates it would allow someone working in the same building to express fear. Hostile Workplace
If Google is terrified of the AWU I'll eat my hat. They're an annoying fly at best and when they pull stunts like this (getting members fired because there are regulations surrounding strikes) it just makes them look impotent.
Compare AWU to an actual functional Union like the Teamsters (preferably WITHOUT Hoffa) or the Mariners Unions. They actually get things done and have largely done so since inception.
Since the UN recognizes that Israel's occupation is marked by apartheid (this is obvious from the apartheid laws regulating land grab), then Google objectively supports an apartheid state - and doesn't like to be reminded publicly. This is just another event in a string of increasingly shameful manifestations of Google cynicism.
In 1990, Google would have been on the wrong side of history and would have collaborated with the then apartheid South African government.
All we need to do is extend whatever boycott decisions we make in our daily lives to Google themselves (e.g. avoid watching ads in youtube, resigning from alphabet companies, etc...)
that can take criticism from others without reacting like it’s been picked on. It doesn’t respond with hostility to reports from human-rights organizations. It doesn’t hate the UN and try to sabotage its operations. It abides by international law, and accepts legally-binding directives from bodies like the Security Council and World Court.
In short, it’s a regular part of the world community, like most nations.
It’s funny, isn’t it: Israel prides itself on not being like the others: it’s the only “democracy” etc. Yet when you point out things it is doing wrong, that instantly triggers the “what about the others” reactions. It’s basically an admission that, deep down, it is not so different from those others, after all.
Israel has a large Muslim population. There are three Jews in Egypt. One of these things is not like the other.
For the record, I am horrified by Israel's actions in Gaza. But then I am also horrified by what's going on in Yemen and Sudan, and I don't see anyone marching to demand ceasefires there.
You know anything about the Jewish populations of those places? Do you know about something called the "Lavon Affair", where Israel employed some Egyptian Jews to cover the terrorist actions of the Mossad, with the consequence that the Egyptian govt cracked down on ithe Egyptian Jews? Or for that matter, are you aware that one American Jewish pro-Israel billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, called on the then-US govt to nuke part of the Iranian desert and then nuke Tehran if they didn't stop their nuclear program? At that time Tehran had 10 000 Iranian Jews living there. An American Jewish pro-Israel billionaire quite openly called for the killing of all those Jews, without any compunction - and nobody opened their mouths to protest, including you, Ian Johnston. Why do you hate Jews so much?
To answer your question, instead of going off on a useless rant ... go ogle dropped their "don't be evil" motto as of October of 2015, when Alphabet decided "Do the right thing" was more appropriate. Following that, "don't be evil" was vestigial, at best, a footnote in the CoC, before eventually being quietly removed entirely.
They don't mention what 'the right thing" is (making a profit?). Nor to whom they are supposed to do it (the shareholders?).
But at least they admit that being evil is OK in pursuit of "the right thing". Nice to know where they stand.
Some of us have been shunning go ogle since the year dot ... not paranoid, pragmatic.
You're employed by a company and then you engage in a sit-down protest at your own company, on the company premises refusing to work at the time that you're being paid for and supposed to be working. Isn't that a strike?
Personally I couldn't care less about the situation in the middle east as they've all been at war with each other for millenia and nothing will ever change out there and the rest of us should stop poking our noses into their business and leave them to it. We have so many of our own problems to deal with in the US , UK and Europe, we should sort those out first before we start poking our unwanted noses into other people's business.
I agree with you on most all points except that when there is a problem in that part of the world it can quite easily escalate and become a problem for us too. So witherwhen help nip it in the bud or we play a waiting game where will eventually become involved on a whole other level.
Its basically a lose/lose game. There are no winners anywhere.
You do know that the Brits and the Yanks installed Israel in that location post WWII, right?
We created a rather large problem doing that, as any half-educated chimp would have known well in advance.
Stupidest fucking idea the pair of us ever came up with, that ... and NOTHING that we do will ever fix it.
IMHO... Oar in time. Israel wants more land and will blow the fuck out of anything to get it. I'm not denying that Hamas kicked this off, but Israel is now maxing the opportunity.
The UN is now as useless as the previous version of it and is stuck in some sort of 1950s limbo. It is now 2 tier where the views of the "big boys" supersede the views of most of the rest of the planet.
The whole "Nazi" thing if I remember my history correctly started off with sticking Jews in ghettos and then ended up with a final solution using genocide by gas chamber... and here we have Palestinians put in ghettos and the final solution this time is genocide by any means available.
It's all depressingly familiar and will probably end up with a large radiation zone between the med and India, so no one will "win."
Please enlighten me.
I believe the creation of the state of Israel was an act of grave injustice towards the population of Palestine. It is also my observation that what that state is doing in Gaza today is genocide and not self-defence.
On the other hand, I do not have any ill-feelings towards Jews as an ethnicity, and I am perfectly aware that they themselves suffered immensely during the Third Reich.
If and when simplified political labels can not be avoided, this makes me "antizionist" but not "antisemitic".
(I will consider the ratio of up- vs down-votes as an indication of the correctness of the above-expressed view).
The moment Google caves to protesters like this, they will see their cloud customers vanish.
How many companies would keep their infrastructure hosted with Google if they knew a small group of protesters at a Google office could shut down their business? This becomes a business continuity risk-management issue, not a political issue. One stupid employee says the wrong thing, protest ensues, and the business is shut down. Google really had no choice but to deal with the protesters harshly.
There is still something to be said about on-prem data centers, they are a lot harder to forcibly disconnect.
Lets see what our resident spleen has contributed to this conversation: here are all the comments to date by Dave314159ggggdffsdds on this article in one place, to save you time.
Straightforward apartheid-denial. Conspiracy theories based on your imagination. And admitted total ignorance of the actual facts. Well done, that's the far right mouthbreather stereotype boxes ticked. Do you have any response that isn't openly antisemitic in multiple ways? Openly antisemitic Holocaust denigration. This is what the 'antizionist, not antisemitic' mob are really all about. Do you have any non-racist things to say? What an absurd claim. Semantic quibbling is the last resort of racists caught being racist. Just like homophobes caught being homophobic will argue they aren't 'scared'. Antisemitism is a euphemism for Jew-hatred, and nothing to do with 'semitic'. Yes, antisemites and stooges for Iran say stuff like that, while the rest of the world tells them they're wrong. Straightforward apartheid denial walking hand in hand with antisemitism. Just what we expect from you far-right nuts. No, it's pointing out your racist conspiracy theories are just plain racist. They don't have 'ethical problems'. They have 'jew hating' problems. Hence why Google felt free to ignore and then fire them. It was a small number of people who are openly antisemitic. Obviously Google wasn't going to listen to them pretending to be 'anti-zionist, not antisemitic'.
11 posts of the 89 so far, 21 sentences, and only 6 of those sentences don't accuse someone of apartheid, racism, anti-semitism, jew hating, or being a fascist or far right. The word "nazi" hasn't cropped up, which at least is progress from a a few weeks ago
The various libertarian wingnuts that post here at least say something you can disagree with, but you don't actually say anything. No discussion, no debate, you just start calling everyone anti-semites.
You're the most toxic individual I've encountered in 20+ years reading this rag. Mods, can we have a "block user" button please?
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