No Tech for Apartheid: Google Workers Arrested for Protesting Company’s $1.2B Contract with Israel
Submitted 7 months ago by Hotmailer@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
GrymEdm@lemmy.world 7 months ago
treefrog@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Sounds like they were arrested for trespassing and because they were protesting inside the CEOs office amongst other places.
At stake is that this cloud technology will be used for military applications by IDF and ultimately help perpetuate genocide .
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
Inconveniencing protests that go unrecognized or are criminalized lead to the next step: industrial sabotage.
Maybe Google needs to lose a few servers to captured NSO malware.
Luisp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Google: don’t be --evil–
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Well they actually changed the motto because “don’t be evil” was too ambiguous. The motto now is “do the right thing”. It’s now okay to be evil, as long as you’re “doing the right thing”.
eronth@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yeah, of all the things google has done, rewrite “don’t be evil” is really not one of them. Didn’t their parent company also pick up the motto as well?
bitwaba@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Use two tildes (
~) before and after:Google: don’t be ~~evil~~Google: don’t be
evilT00l_shed@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Don’t be? Evil! A la Lionel Hutz
csm10495@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Say hello to Miguel Sanchez.
MeanEYE@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Good luck with that sentiment. People tried to boycott products made or designed in Israel and then realized it’s near impossible.
Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world 7 months ago
These are not products “made or designed in Israel”. That list is just companies that support Israel.
I just don’t want anyone to have the false impression that a relationship with Israel is necessary. It definitely is not.
local_taxi_fix@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It’s impossible to target all of them, yes. But that’s why BDS creates a targeted list of the worst offenders to concentrate the pressure.
Currently the BDS list includes 8 targets, including HP, Sabra, Siemens, Puma, and Soda stream. bdsmovement.net/get-involved/what-to-boycott
melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee 6 months ago
do steal them though. stealing them is good.
AWittyUsername@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Worked for McDonald’s and Starbucks though. If you boycott the major ones it should have some impact.
dsemy@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Who would’ve thought an evil company would mistreat its employees. They literally worked for a corporation whose main business involved violating your human rights, if they really care they wouldn’t have worked there in the first place.
LoveSausage@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
Instead they should just work for all those good companies that’s everywhere under capitalism. Workers don’t have a say in company policy and companies are as bad as they can be. The fact that nestle murder more people than Fazer , isn’t about that one is more “evil” than the other, it’s what they can get away with. Evil is a childish concept.
paddirn@lemmy.world 6 months ago
From “Do no evil” to now, “Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb”.
KonalaKoala@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Last time I heard a line like that is by Dark Helmet in Space Balls.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Am I being an idiot for thinking that protesting when the union is relatively small is counterproductive? I’d think I’d want to represent the majority of the workers, then protest or outright strike, if that’s what the majority of union members vote to do.
Wrench@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Well, it made the national news, so seems like it was somewhat effective.
noxy@yiffit.net 7 months ago
Doesn’t matter, even if it was just two workers it’s still protected concerted activity which is illegal to retaliate against.
Wrench@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Trespassing is not a protected form of protest. Wtf are you talking about?
whoreticulture@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
I’m sure they’d love to have enough supporters to do a general strike, and those have been proposed and attempted over Gaza. Unfortunately, opposing Israel is not the mainstream view… especially being opposed enough to participate in activism. With only a handful of people, these sit-ins were able to disrupt the company and make news.
WallEx@feddit.de 7 months ago
So You think they shouldn’t have done anything, because the union is not big enough? Moral is not an option with a small union? Am I getting this right?
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
I think it depends on the goal. If I’m trying to stop a corporation from doing something profitable a large union, one that contains most corpo workers, including the ones producing this profit, can strike, halting the production that generates this profit. The union could do this for a moral reason. If the union however contains for the sake of argument 1% of the workers and none of the ones doing the work in question, then staging a protest can’t force a stop to the morally reprehensible production. It also makes this 1% an easy target to get rid of thus making it harder to organize more workers needed to stop production. So if I wanted to gain this power over the corpo, I would probably protest outside of union capacity.
Son_of_dad@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Seems misleading, as I highly doubt they were charged with “protesting contract with Israel”. Is that a misdemeanor?
GeneralVincent@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It’s a trespassing charge from what I could find. Although there are laws against boycotting Israel
Maggoty@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The anti BDS laws are relevant to companies, not workers. Though it is still hilarious to me that we can’t have religious freedom because companies have a first amendment right however they can’t exercise that right in regards to Israel.
The GOP is just so transparently making shit up as they go along for their own convenience.
WallEx@feddit.de 7 months ago
Thats so wild
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yes. All 28 of them. Out of what, 180,000-ish?
locke@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
Does this mean there are open, superbly paid positions at Google?
Sneptaur@pawb.social 7 months ago
“Hmm, these people got arrested for being against genocide. Sounds like a great place for me to work!”
I sure hope you’re joking
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
You may underestimate the ongoing desperation for paid full time work with benefits in the US.
A lot of folk are one paycheck, one tragedy, one road accident or severe sickness away from homelessness.
And homelessness is already criminalized in some counties.
locke@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
Well, I probably cannot get in there anyway so it’s a bit moot.
Maeve@kbin.social 7 months ago
disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 7 months ago
position to be removed as downsizing opportunity following termination
WallEx@feddit.de 7 months ago
Wow, a genuine genocide supporter, would you look at that.
JdW@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Wow, a genuine terrorsim supporter. would you look at that.
Prethoryn@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I am seeing a lot of comments on here but the context not being mentioned is that they were protesting while clocked in or working on the clock.
Google is technically in authority to do that. The article is worded a bit out of context to make the act of protesting an a big company we all find to be evil more evil for letting employees go that were wasting company time.
I get it before you even type it I understand Google isn’t short on money and the time portion won’t effect them but has the employees protested while clocked out this would have been a less likely outcome and I also get it, “yeah they would have fired them anyway.” Sure believe what you want but it doesn’t take away that Google had the authority to fire while the employees were in their time no matter what they were protesting. If I did this at my job and was getting paid they would fire me as well.
diffusive@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Confidentially incorrect: at Google there is no clock in and no clock out (for employees, contractors is different). At Google you can work 1h per day or 20h per day you earn the same. Performances are assessed on the output not on the hour worked.
So, no, find another reason for which Google is right. Popular topic is “they disrupt other people work by making noise” or “they destroyed properties… you cannot see in the picture but they destroyed millions of precious bacteria on the floor”
gian@lemmy.grys.it 6 months ago
I think that there are two main reasons that caused them to be fired: insubordination since they occupied the CEO’s office and refused to leave when asked (and probably he don’t asked only one time) which led to the second reason, they were arrested for trespassing in the CEO’s office.
Sp00kyB00k@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That’s the point of protest. The rules are made to keep the status quo, not be good. And some rules suck balls.
melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee 6 months ago
does your job support a genocidal theocratic ethnostate?
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
It wouldn’t be a very effective protest if they did it on their own time lol
spiderwort@lemm.ee 6 months ago
What’s up with all the masks? Do they want to be anonymous?
melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee 6 months ago
the_post_of_tom_joad@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
It’s not a protest if it doesn’t inconvenience who you’re protesting. All real protesters are arrested, because they inconvenience power (who have but the way made all inconvenient protests illegal).
CatTrickery@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
Protest should intend on being an inconvenience, though arrest should be avoided if at all possible. It absolutely kills longevity and leads to people making arrest a core intention while rambling about non-violence. Really what you want is to have strategy and numbers that spook cops enough to not bother because they won’t if they think its going to be too much trouble for them.
the_post_of_tom_joad@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Agreed. I didn’t mean to imply after was the goal but rather a common side-effect of real protest
Maggoty@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Most protest arrests in the US are released the same day or the next day. Nobody looking to make a movement is getting taken off the board.
Of course the people in power do keep trying to change that. But as of yet, they’ve been unsuccessful.