You’re Fired! Google it.

Google says workers can't use the company as a "personal platform" to protest the sale of technology to Israel.

SAN FRANCISCO – So, you work for a company and you don’t like one of the products they sell and who they sell it to. What do you do?

If you work at Google maybe you stage a protest, take over the bosses office, block other employees from coming to or doing their work, and tell the media that the company you work for is participating in genocide. Yup, call the company complicit in murder, and expect to come back to work the next day. Perhaps only in today’s world would you think that’s not a firing offense.

Conflict comes to Tech.

Student protests at college campuses across the US have now spilled over onto corporate campuses — as the tech giant Google has fired some 50 workers for using the company as a “personal platform” to fight “over disruptive issues,” and “debate politics.”

The “disruptive issues” and politics debated? The Israeli-Hamas conflict and the role, protestors claim, that Google is playing in the genocide of Palestinians.

But it’s not really a debate. On April 16 some Google employees engaged in “sit-ins” at Google’s California and New York City offices. The sit-ins included at least 8 employees who occupied the Google Cloud CEO’s office and had to be removed by the police and arrested. Protestors blocked entrances to the building, stairwells and common spaces within.

The renegade employees were ”denouncing the company’s cloud computing deal with the Israeli government,” according to a Washington Post report.

“We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action,” the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said in a memo, which the company posted online. “But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this 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, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.”

Jane Chung, a spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid, the organizers of the protests, told the Post that, “The corporation is attempting to quash dissent, silence its workers and reassert its power over them.”

Quash dissent? Silence Workers? Reassert power?

What is it with employees who believe that sit-ins and protests AT work, during the working day, disrupting others working, is somehow part of THEIR free-speech rights? Google employees were not being fired for having opinions – they were fired for disrupting the workplace and making other workers feel threatened and intimidated.

And guess what? Companies do have power over employees – like the power to hire and fire them, and to expect – however quaint that idea may be these days -- they will do THEIR work and not stop OTHERS from doing theirs. If you don’t like what Google is doing, quit.

No Tech for Apartheid had called for a national day of action to protest Google’s contract with Israel to provide cloud computing technology that No Tech claims promotes the genocide of Palestinians. “Google workers do not want their labor to power Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” the organization posted on its website. “That’s why on April 16, Google workers with No Tech For Apartheid are leading a coast-to-coast day of action to demand that Google stop doing business with Israel and providing tech to this genocide.”

When asked about the protests, a Google spokesperson told NPR in an email that “physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior. After refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety.”

Zelda Montes, a software engineer at Google who was fired for participating in the No Tech protests, told NPR that the firings are a fear tactic that won’t work. “Workers are agitated and we’re organized,” she said, “and we’ll keep organizing until this project is dropped.”

Besides cancelling the $1.2 billion Israeli cloud contract, protestors also demanded, according to a Fox Business report, that Google address "health and safety issues" in the workplace, which arose from the "mental health consequences of working at a company that is using their labor to enable a genocide."

The spokesperson for Google also told NPR that “its cloud services support several governments around the world, including Israel. Project Nimbus is for government ministries,” adding that "this work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services."

Again, if you don’t like what the company you are working for is doing, there is a simple answer. Quit. Then you can protest all you want while absolving yourself of whatever guilt or mental health consequences you are experiencing by contributing to whatever social or moral ill you believe the company is promoting.

Is speech at work free speech?

“Google workers have the right to peacefully protest about terms and conditions of our labor,” Google employees told the New York Times. But that's not what they are protesting. They are telling Google what it can sell and to whom.

“Generally,” writes Abby Warren in the National Law Review, “there is no right to free speech in private workplaces since the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution does not apply to private sector employers.” According to Warren, “such rights may be granted under state laws which vary greatly.” However, “conversations or expressions that disrupt working time and operations, may not be protected.”

And according to an American Bar Association publication, “free-speech protections do not necessarily extend to venting and other actions that could be viewed as insubordination or that create a hostile work environment among colleagues.”

“Despite what many employees think,” Tom Spiggle, an employment lawyer writing for Forbes, cautioned, “your rights to freedom of speech are fairly limited at work, and it’s often perfectly legal for an employer to take action against a worker for something they said or wrote.” Oh, and also for forcibly occupying someone’s office, or preventing other employees from going to work, or from working. That sounds pretty disruptive and hostile to me.

Despite No Tech’s calls for a broad-based protest, only a handful of employees participated in the “day of action.” The news magazine Time, reported that only about 200 Google employees are part of No Tech. Google has about 180,000 employees worldwide.

Just Google it!

While complaining that Google is trying to quash dissent and silence workers, the protestors should have known that their sit-in wasn’t protected free-speech and that they could be fired. All they had to do was Google it.