A Google employee said on Tuesday that she would resign after saying Google had tried to retaliate against her for opposing a company contract with the Israeli military.
The employee, Ariel Koren, a marketing manager for Google’s educational products who has worked for the company for seven years, wrote a memo to colleagues announcing her plan to leave Google at the end of the week.
She spent more than a year organizing against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion agreement for Google and Amazon to supply the Zionist entity and its military with artificial intelligence tools and other computing services.
Ms. Koren, 28, helped circulate petitions and lobby executives, and she talked to news organizations, all in an effort to get Google to reconsider the deal.
Then, in November, she said, came a surprising ultimatum from Google: Agree to move to São Paulo, Brazil, within 17 business days or lose your job.
Ms. Koren marketed educational products to Latin America and was based in Mexico City before moving to San Francisco during the pandemic. But, she said, there was not a clear business justification for the mandated move or its urgency, and a supervisor in Brazil told her that employees in São Paulo were working from home because of the pandemic.
Google and the National Labor Relations Board investigated her complaint and found “no wrongdoing.”
Fifteen other Google employees posted audio testimonies to YouTube on Tuesday asking the company not to work with the Zionist entity and criticizing Google’s treatment of Palestinians and its censorship of employees who support them. All but two of the workers spoke anonymously. They released their remarks to coincide with Ms. Koren’s departure from the company.
“Google systematically silences Palestinian, Jewish, Arab and Muslim voices concerned about Google’s complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights — to the point of formally retaliating against workers and creating an environment of fear,” Ms. Koren wrote in the letter explaining her decision to resign.
“We thoroughly investigated this employee’s claim, as we do when any concerns are raised,” she added.
Source: The New York Times
