Google teaches 28 employees a lesson for disrupting workplace to protest contracts with Israel — and it took just two words

More than two dozen Google employees are learning a hard lesson after using their workplaces to protest Google's contracts with Israel.

On Tuesday, dozens of Google employees participated in a protest of Google's $1.2 billion contract with Israel to provide the country's military and government with cloud computing services. The employees demonstrated inside Google's New York office and the Sunnyvale, California, office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

Protesters held signs reading, "No more genocide for profit" and "Googlers against genocide." Nine of the protesters were eventually arrested. The demonstration was organized by No Tech For Apartheid.

On Wednesday, Google said 28 of the protesters had been officially terminated. A statement explained:

Their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made coworkers feel threatened. We placed employees involved under investigation and cut their access to our systems. Those who refused to leave were arrested by law enforcement and removed from our offices. Following investigation, today we terminated the employment of twenty-eight employees found to be involved. We will continue to investigate and take action as needed.

Surprisingly, Google is not giving in to the protesters' demands and warned employees they will face a similar fate if they follow in their now-former colleagues' steps.

"Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it," Google said.

"The overwhelming majority of our employees do the right thing. If you're one of the few who are tempted to think we're going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again," the statement continued. "The company takes this extremely seriously, and we will continue to apply our longstanding policies to take action against disruptive behavior — up to and including termination."

Meanwhile, No Tech For Apartheid claimed the terminations were "retaliatory" and "illegal."

"Google workers have the right to peacefully protest about terms and conditions of our labor," the group alleged in a statement.

That is true: Google employees can protest their employer. But Google bosses also have the right to fire employees, who, instead of working, disrupt the workplace with political demonstrations, as 28 so-called "Googlers" just learned.

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