No Tech for Apartheid: Google Workers Arrested for Protesting Company’s $1.2B Contract with Israel
No Tech for Apartheid: Google Workers Arrested for Protesting Company’s $1.2B Contract with Israel
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).
I'm proud of these guys for standing up for what they believe in. Solidarity.
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.
Agreed. I didn't mean to imply arrest was the goal but rather a common side-effect of effective protest.
Sounds like they were arrested for trespassing 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 .
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.
Google: don't be --evil--
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".
Don't be? Evil! A la Lionel Hutz
Say hello to Miguel Sanchez.
Good luck with that sentiment. People tried to boycott products made or designed in Israel and then realized it's near impossible. Edit: Found a list
That list is 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.
It's impossible to target all of them, yes. But that's why BDS creates a targeted list of the worst offenders to concentrate consumer boycott pressure.
Currently the BDS list includes 8 targets, including HP, Sabra, Siemens, Puma, and Soda stream. https://bdsmovement.net/get-involved/what-to-boycott
do steal them though. stealing them is good.
edit: this got down votes? let me explain: if you just dont buy them, someone else can. If you steal them, then whatever middleman spends the cost but doesn't make the profit. if lots of people steal them, the insurance on that cargo/merchandise goes up. it gets more expensive and eventually market forces mean those products won't get stocked, when theres any alternative.
which means they get less. you not having to go without, or even making a profit, is just a nice bonus.
It worked for McDonald's and Starbucks though. If you boycott the major ones it should have some impact.
From "Don't be evil" to now, "Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb".
Last time I heard a line like that is by Dark Helmet in Space Balls.
Who would've thought an evil company would mistreat its employees. They literally work for a corporation whose main business involves violating your human rights, if they really care they wouldn't have worked there in the first place.
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.
Seems misleading, as I highly doubt they were charged with "protesting contract with Israel". Is that a misdemeanor?
Also love that Google workers suddenly grew a conscience
It's a trespassing charge from what I could find. Although there are laws against boycotting Israel
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/feb/21/us-supreme-court-arkansas-anti-boycott-israel-law
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.
Thats so wild
Yes. All 28 of them. Out of what, 180,000-ish?
Am I being an idiot for thinking that protesting like this, 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 which will halt the cloud operations they want to halt, if that's what the majority of union members vote to do.
Well, it made the national news, so seems like it was somewhat effective.
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's genocidal actions 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.
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?
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.
E: They're already gone..
What's up with all the masks? Do they want to be anonymous?
yes, or they really should.
why organized labor isnt willing to kill, but still thinks they can be effective, is so far beyond me.
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.
EDIT: Lemmy is Reddit but it's full of users in denial.
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” (of course people can work on a laptop in another place because there is generally no special equipment at the desk but details) or “they destroyed properties… you cannot see in the picture but they destroyed millions of precious bacteria on the floor”
"Google pays its employees in two ways: monthly or bi-weekly installments, and bonuses. Google's compensation structure is based on three components: salary, bonus, and equity. Salary is determined by several factors, including: Role, Level, Location, Cost of labor in the region, and Pay targets." Literally the first Google (unironically).
I am all for pointing bad things out that companies do but contractors can still be fired or let go if those contractors aren't meeting performance. Tek Systems is a contractor that does just this.
"Performance is assess on the output." - my dude you literally just said, "Google can fire them" what is it with the Lemmy brain? It's a circle jerk in here of people talking about how they are better because they are on a defederated platform using open source tools and software but doing the exact same thing other platforms do. Boxing yourselves in justifying your opinions just to be a part of a group then claiming to have the better opinion that the "shit" you see on Reddit
Lemmy users and the platform are literally no different than others. You aren't better because you are not a "normie" and don't have to deal with the consequences of Windows or other OS's. That doesn't go without saying there isn't knowledge and information to share learn from others and Lemmy has knowledge worth listening to but God damn if some people on here aren't just as likely to just justify their own opinions the same as another platform and for God's sake I get that it's the Internet but if you can say that then you are self aware that your opinion is not completely reasonable without discussing it.
I don't need to find another reason Google isn't the problem because their are many reasons Google is a problem but this case is being taken out of context. If they were employees disrupting the work place and protesting on company time then Google was within their rights to fire them. If the are contractors then from a quick assessment they clearly were not performing as paid and hired to do so. Google had a right to fire these people no matter what side of the fence you stand on. Does it suck? Sure. I don't care if you are a down with Google person if you can't understand this then you are just flat out unreasonable and the same as any other user on any other platform.
That's the point of protest. The rules are made to keep the status quo, not be good. And some rules suck balls.
This is sort of a shit opinion, IMO. Why should a company have to change the rules to pay me when I am not working on their time?
Keeping people productive on companies time is not a "status quo" it's working on working time. If these employees had just protested after their shifts Google could have probably still and would have more than likely fired them either way but the point is that it wouldn't have been on their time giving them less grounds to do so.
does your job support a genocidal theocratic ethnostate?
Get the fuck out of here with the straw man. Google is and has been a problem in more ways than one but they were within their rights to fire people. This is just a dumb ass question to divert right into your already justified opinion because Google is "evil" and it needs to stay that way but if you can't see that a company has a right to fire when you are getting paid on their time then you are just as unreasonable.
It sucks for these people but you are just as much in the circlejerk on Lemmy as everyone else if your first statement is a question asking something like this because you can't discuss it and would rather find any other reasons to just say "But Google bad." No one is disagreeing with this that Google isn't a monopoly, powerhouse, and abuses its uses. The point and statement here is that Google had a right to fire them.
It wouldn't be a very effective protest if they did it on their own time lol
"It wouldn't be very effective if they did it on their own time." - well it appears to me it wasn't very effective doing it on company time.
In fact I would argue that the majority of these stories have a higher impact when they are very much not doing it on company time because then Google fires against the law. There are laws that protect you while protesting or going into a union in certain states. Google has fired numerous times breaking California laws for firing while people are trying to unionize or protest off the company time which I would say is more effective because it garners far more attention.