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Another scandal has once more broken out between Google and its employees, with the workers expressing their concerns on the allegations that Google is in collaboration with the United States Immigration. The workers started demanding answers on the connection between the company and the immigration services. They have also demanded to know if the company will be offering cloud services to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), with concerns that their efforts and labour could be secretly used to power Trump administration policies.
The workers’ demands are quite serious. Just mid this month, more than 1,300 of them put down their signs on a petition that demanded that the company publicly announce its non-commitment or partnership with the government agency. These demands were because of the allegations or accusations on the agency for engaging in infringement of human rights. Apparently, the signs on the petition were not only from Google employees but also from 79 outsiders, some of whom were former Google employees and Amazon employees.
As if it was planned, the petition was right in time to coincide with the bidding period for a cloud computing contract of the United States Customs Border Protection, which, if all conditions had remained the same, Google would have provided.
Apparently, the scandalous rumours seem to be accurate as documents revealed by The Verge show that similar deals are already in place and from the information, they are quite lucrative. This comes after two years, that is 2017, when a third-party software provider came close to making a $750,000 deal, in which it, (the service provider), was to offer Google cloud service to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which is one of the branches of the Homeland Security Department.
These are still treated as rumours since the document did not directly reveal the involvement of Google. However, the two-year license for Apigee Edge Private Cloud provided by the contract point seems to point fingers at Google. It is also right to say that the contract is still in use, judging from the fact that the contract was signed in 2017.
The employees’ move makes Google the latest world company to be lobbied by its workers, especially with relation to the US immigration policy.
However, this does not mean other employees in other companies have not made any moves towards stopping the immigration policy from being effective. Just recently, in June, Wayfair employees walked out of the workplace, protesting the selling of furniture to migrant child detention facilities.
We could say these are noble moves because the immigration policy seems to be infringing on human rights. This is quite evident from the discovery by US auditors of the US government to have kept migrant children in poor conditions.
