Alphabet Inc’s Google has put more than two dozen employees on immediate administrative leave after they were involved in protests against Project Nimbus, a US$1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon.com Inc to provide the Israeli government with AI and cloud services.

The protests, which were led by the No Tech for Apartheid organisation, took place Tuesday across Google offices in New York City, Seattle, and Sunnyvale, California. Protesters in New York and California staged a nearly 10-hour sit-in, with others documenting the action, including through a Twitch livestream. Nine of them were arrested Tuesday evening on trespassing charges.

On Wednesday, several workers involved in the protests, including those who were not directly engaged in the sit-in, received a message from the company’s Employee Relations group informing them that they had been put on leave. “Administrative leave means that we will be shutting off your access to Google’s campuses and systems and you are required to refrain from work until further notice and not come into the office,” according to the email, which was seen by Bloomberg. “We are keeping this matter as confidential as possible, only disclosing information on a need to know basis.”

Google has long favoured a culture of open debate, but employee activism in recent years has tested that commitment. Workers who organised a 2018 walkout over the company’s handling of sexual assault allegations said Google punished them for their activism. Four other workers alleged they were fired for organising opposition to Google’s work with federal Customs and Border Protection and for other workplace advocacy.

US labour law gives employees the right to engage in collective action related to working conditions. Tech workers will likely argue that this should grant them the ability to band together to object to how the tools they create are used, said John Logan, a professor of labour at San Francisco State University.

“Tech workers are not like other kinds of workers,” he said. “You can make an argument in this case that having some sort of say or control or ability to protest about how their work product is being used is actually a sort of key issue.”

Tech companies like Google have a reputation for having “more egalitarian and very cosmopolitan work cultures, but when they encountered labour activism among their own workers, they actually responded in a sort of quite draconian way,” Logan added. 

Two Googlers who were involved in the protest in California told Bloomberg that a group of workers gathered on the sixth floor of Google’s Sunnyvale bureau, where Cloud chief executive officer Thomas Kurian’s office is located, to show support for those who were staging the sit-in. Company security staff arrived and told the workers they weren’t allowed to record video or chant, according to the employees.

One worker said Google may have framed the move to place employees on leave as “confidential” to save face publicly, and argued that the protesters did not violate any company policies. The protesters left the building as soon as they were asked to and did not obstruct or disrupt others at the company, the person said.

The broad suspensions of workers, including those who were more tangentially involved in the demonstration, signals that Google is trying to send a message, said Ariel Koren, a former Google employee who has played a prominent role in protests against Project Nimbus.

“The point they’re trying to make is to send a deep-seated, chilling effect across the company and scare all of the workers into submission,” said Koren, who resigned from Google after she said she faced retaliation.

Beyond the protest, Google has struggled with how to manage internal debate about the Middle East conflict. After the demonstration, posts on internal Google forums featured a mix of pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli sentiment, with a number of other workers saying they felt the topic was inappropriate for the workplace, a Google employee said. Moderators locked down some threads on the subject, saying prior discussions had gotten too heated, the employee added.  

Despite Google’s response, employees demonstrating against Project Nimbus have seen an uptick in support since the sit-in, said one of the suspended workers.  

  - Bloomberg