Microsoft has fired two employees who organized an unauthorized vigil at the company’s headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel’s war with Hamas.
The two employees told The Associated Press they were fired by phone call late Thursday, several hours after a lunchtime event they organized at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington.
Both workers were members of a coalition of employees called “No Azure for Apartheid” that has opposed Microsoft’s sale of its cloud-computing technology to the Israeli government. But they contended that Thursday’s event was similar to other Microsoft-sanctioned employee giving campaigns for people in need.
“We have so many community members within Microsoft who have lost family, lost friends or loved ones,” said Abdo Mohamed, a researcher and data scientist. “But Microsoft really failed to have the space for us where we can come together and share our grief and honor the memories of people who can no longer speak for themselves.”
Microsoft said Friday it has “ended the employment of some individuals in accordance with internal policy” but declined to provide details.
Google earlier this year fired more than 50 workers in the aftermath of protests over technology the company is supplying the Israeli government amid the Gaza war. The firings stemmed from internal turmoil and sit-in protests at Google offices centered on “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.
Cancel culture strikes again… From the right as usual.
Can’t wait to hear Bari Weiss’ take on this.
🦗 🦗 🦗
Honestly I don’t know much about the war over there because I’ve been actively avoiding info about it (just got enough problems without piling on a war I have no skin in) but organizing unsanctioned political events on company grounds sounds like it’s looking for heat. That’s a publicity traded company but not a government entity so freedom of speech isn’t really a shield there.
Grieving murdered family and friends is political?
Politics is everything
I never understand how people are surprised with this sort of thing happens.
They did something on company property that the company probably would not approve of and got let go for it. And it sounds like they seem to think they company should be providing space to do it.
People really should learn to keep their political opinions out of the office where your opinions might run counter to the person that controls your ability to pay your bills.
I’m not surprised at all, the westerners supporting Hamas and HezzyB are dumb as fuck.
Obviously, since they “fix their bugs” so much, they need people to not be distracted. Right? Right? It’s not because they’re probably racist assholes.
Why would you organise this on company headquarters without the consent of the company?
If you tell your employers that you hate the way they operate, what do you think is going to happen?
This is a Neoliberal anthem: rights are for citizens; employees need to sit down and STFU.
Why do we reject tyranny.gov, but embrace tyranny.com?
I don’t think this is any of that though. Company property isn’t public property. The company can refuse service to people and require people to have permits for assembly. Employees don’t need to sit down and stfu, but there are ways to properly organize and do all the things they want without getting fired
You can go on a protest whenever you want. Don’t expect your employers to be enthusiastic about it if you organise one in your workplace, however.
Worldist and genocide apology, name a more iconic duo
If Israel wanted to commit a genocide in Palestine, they could literally carpet bomb the entire place in a day and be done with it.
While they could power-wise, they won’t because that’d be too overt. They have to keep the meat grinder at a steady pace so as not to have countries coming in to stop them. Slow genocide is how they win. If you kill a little at a time countries think they can’t act on it or behave like they can’t.
This.
Microsoft doesn’t really care about the employees politics. The problem was that the employees were actively trying to lower profits by shrinking the market
It’s called a protest. Social movements protest to get a message across.
You think they’d get permission?
Also, this isn’t really a protest… A vigil. Microsoft is a trash corporation. None of this is surprising.
So hold it elsewhere? Why does it have to be at a business? Seems a weird place to have a vigil anyways. Why not somewhere more somber or respectful?
Well, given the kind of company, it’s not like you’d obtain a consent if you asked. They’re too busy getting that Israeli money.
If you work for a company, you’re a representative of that company. If you disagree with the businesses they work with, don’t work for that company.
Or if you really have a problem and want to express yourself, don’t do it at your workplace. It’s stupid.
If you work for a company, you’re a representative of that company.
I’m not. Corporate is paying for my work (and barely, at that, given current rates), not for my ethics or for my ethical standing before other people who might not work at the company. If you believe otherwise, you might have been brainwashed by corporate-paid education.
It’s literally how employment works. Unless you’re self-employed, you represent the people who pay you.
no I fucking do not you bootlicker
Last I checked we sell our labor power, not our entirety of our existence.
Ppl seem to rly want slavery modes of labor back again. Sad
Lol, what?
You represent your employers at work, not every waking hour.
I’m sorry that the facts don’t fit your narrative. It must be frustrating.
yea I’m seething you dork
They didn’t even hand me a uniform or a qt cap, and they work with Node.js despite several warnings; I ain’t representing shit.
If it didn’t get approved, I can understand why the company would take that stance.
But I do think they should have just approved the event
Right, my daily reminder that the US doesn’t belive in human rights. Article 23 of the UN human rights declaration for anyone curious. This is also a fun, yet basic resource: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/countries-with-independent-national-human-rights-institution?time=latest
It’s sad that the west still glorifies this fucking homunculus that not only doesn’t try to adhere to any agreed principals and values, but actively goes against them. The republicans are against half the things written in there, while the dems “compromise” so hard that “barely making it” is the ultimate unachievable goal in the distance to aim towards. Fucking pathetic.
They are right, why da fck someone organize a political vigil on a work place? People need to start using their brains
When the workplace is assisting the genocide of the people the vigil is for.
Is the only vigil that’s not political is for American white men that died?
Bro dont organize nothing in your work place, its common sense. You want a vigil? Nice, go to a public place and do it, first you are trying to drag the company to your fight and maybe the company just dont want to take sides, second: what is your target audience? The people that you can talk to on the rest room of the company? Cmon…
You know full well this wouldn’t have happened if this was any other vigil not for black or brown people. Specifically not Palestine as well.
But yeah, obey the masters. Make them more money. As they siphon your wage and downright steal from you. Hope it works out in the long run and doesn’t come to a singularity or some other dystopian reality. Not like we don’t already live in one.
You know full well this wouldn’t have happened if this was any other vigil not for black or brown people. Specifically not Palestine as well.
Yep. The pro-Israel bias of those in power in the U.S. is absolutely disgusting. A vigil for other groups would have been no problem.
Bro dont organize nothing in your work place, its common sense.
I understand your sentiment, but you’re basically asking people to be only protest in places it’s easier to ignore
Political vigil… for genocide victims… for people murdered in a genocide… I guess having a holocaust remembrance day at work is a political act now?
Unionize
Daily reminder, you have freedom of speech in that the government won’t do anything about your speech, but you don’t have freedom from speech. Going out and protesting your employer and their business relationships can and will get you fired, no matter how just the cause.
Because profits drive everything
You would think israel pays all of these mega corpos bills… Like holyshit it isba country of 7 million people… Do these mega corps get this bent out for US?
I’m beginning to think this Microsoft company might fucking suck.
I don’t really think Microsoft is at a fault though. If the US supports it, they are not taking a side as much as they are supporting the military
It’s a hard sell to say they aren’t at least complicit, BUT realistically what could they do?
They have heavy US contracting ties, who’s to say the US govt wouldn’t pull funding over non-support of Israel.
Oh I’m sure they would pull contracts. The government has contracts in probably every major cloud provider in the States and wouldn’t mind moving to any other.
Plus where do you draw the line if you’re a cloud provider? Can you support any military IT? Or just ones related to Israel? If you don’t provide cloud support to the US and to Israel, are you supporting Palestine? You basically just can’t win
I mean…they organized in the company headquarters witbout any kind of authorization to do so. Almost any company would have fired those responsible. I don’t think it has to do with political opinion so much as unauthorized use of facilities.
Microsoft should go macro-shaft themselves.
As always, fuck Microsoft. Literally been saying this over 30 years already.
Don’t use windows, switch to Linux. It’s free, actually reasonably secure, actually works, won’t spy on you, won’t force shit on you just to make you pay more.
Don’t use Microsoft azure. It’s overpriced and runs in Linux anyway.
Don’t use Microsoft 365 online shit. Outlook functions horrendously bad, teams is a sad joke. I unfortunately have to deal with teams every day because government customers thought it was a good idea and EVERY call there is some shit. People can’t get in, people don’t have audio, people ALWAYS have the wrong audio device selected no matter what and need to spend the first 5 minutes to get their audio and video working. It’s shit quality compared to zoom or Google meet or open source alternatieves…
Stop giving this piece of shit your money
I need a practice laptop to learn Linux with…
Or a flash drive. You can just boot it from a flash drive to see if you enjoy it. Set your motherboard BIOS to boot from USB before booting from an internal drive. When the flash drive with Linux is plugged in, it’ll boot from that instead of booting Windows.
Oh nice. See, this is the kind of stuff I’ll have to look up lol
Yeah, booting from USB is something you see a lot in the data security and/or privacy-oriented circles. Because many USB boot drives are designed to be volatile, meaning nothing about the OS is actually stored on the drive. So you can nuke the whole OS just by unplugging the drive.
Basically every (smart) drug dealer who orders their supplies on Tor uses a USB drive OS, so if the cops ever bust down their door they can just yank the USB and destroy all evidence of their online orders.
But it can also be useful for test-driving a particular repo. If you ever manage to fuck things up royally, you’re just one reboot away from a fresh start.
Hold up. Azure runs on Linux? Lol could have guessed that, but still is funny.
Azure runs on windows. Hosts run a modified version of Hyper-V.
At least, they did last I checked.
I work at a place that uses Azure to run everything (not my choice…).
Everything we have runs on Linux containers, Linux Azure functions, and a VM that runs Ubuntu.
You can run Windows on Azure but you certainly don’t have to.
We have a similar mix, though I was referring to the underlying virtualisation providing their cloud hosting.
Are there some open source Teams alternatives you’d recommend?
Mattermost
Thanks, I’ll check that out!
You can use teams in a browser, that’s really all it is on dekstop anyway.
Not really. Teams in browser is buggy enough to be barely functional
I wasn’t asking about a Linux client for Teams, I was asking about an open source alternative to Teams
Oh OK lol
remember this when they talk about being gay friendly or anything else even remotely “woke”
I don’t expect companies to be doing that much anymore.
War Profiteering: It’s not just for weapons manufacturers any more!
