Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees not to “fight over disruptive issues or debate politics” at the office, a day after the company fired 28 workers who had protested against Googles cloud computing and AI services contract with Israel.
In a company blog post late Thursday titled “Building for our AI future,” Pichai didn’t specifically mention the protests or Israel’s war in Gaza, focusing instead on the company’s work on artificial intelligence technology. But in a final section of the memo subtitled “Mission first,” Pichai said that Google parent Alphabet “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.”
Earlier Thursday, Google’s head of security Chris Rackow sent an internal memo saying that the employees who protested the company’s contract with the Israeli government and military “took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers.”
The group behind the protests, No Tech for Apartheid, has called for Alphabet to pull out of Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion Israeli government contract it shares with Amazon to provide cloud computing technology. Protests this week were part of an action called “No Tech for Genocide.” Protest organizers wrote that, “Google workers do not want their labor to power Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”
Israel has denied accusations that its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip amounts to a genocide.