Google employees who occupied the California office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian for more than eight hours to demand the company stop doing business with Israel were arrested late Tuesday.
The employees broadcast their protest on a “notech4apartheid’ Twitch livestream. The video showed they given the opportunity to leave voluntarily, and then arrested by police after refusing to do so.
In the stream, a man is seen approaching the protesters to notify them that they were put on administrative leave and asking them to leave.
“It’s getting kinda late,” the man says. “I wanted to ask you, you know, to cooperate, you’ve been placed on admin leave and we’d like to see if you’d just voluntarily [leave] it’s been a while. Can you do that for us?”
When he threatens to call law enforcement, employees state that they understand. Seconds later, police walk in the office and detain them all before the livestream cuts off.
The protests were announced in internal emails to employees that shared a list of demands, including that Google drop its $1.2 billion contract with Israel for Project Nimbus, a cloud-computing project of the Israeli government.
Demands also include that Google cease all “business with the Israeli apartheid government and military,” stop the “harassment, intimidation, bullying, and silencing,” of Palestinian and Muslim employees, and address the “health and safety crisis” among workers who are rattled over their labor being…
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