Google fires employees linked to policy protests

Google fired four employees on Monday linked to its recent employee protest against the company’s policies. Google says the employees leaked data from colleagues, according to the people behind the protest, Google wants to silence employees.

Google confirms to Bloomberg, among other things, that it has fired the four employees. The search giant confirms that a memo published by Bloomberg is genuine. In it, the company claims that the employees in question have looked up personal data of colleagues and shared it outside the company. That’s against the rules and when they didn’t stop even after warnings, Google fired them.

Colleagues claim in a post on Medium that Google is about demotivating Google employees to organize for protest. The four employees oppose, among other things, a Google Cloud trial at border security and the policy on hate speech on video site YouTube. The employees also claim that Google is lying in the memo. On Friday, one of the dismissed employees was said to have been told that he had not become the subject of investigation due to data leaks.

Google declined to comment further on the layoffs and the Medium post. The protest from Google employees has been going on for months. The Tech Workers Coalition, a union of workers in the tech industry, calls the layoffs ‘draconian’ and claims that Google wants to scare other employees in this way.