And there’s nothing preventing employees from finding a new place to work if they don’t agree with how their company handles things. It’s a multinational corporation not college or even a democracy.
But the company shouldn't prevent employees from trying to improve their workplace for their fellow employees either way, especially given the power imbalance between employers and employees. Children, debt, high COL, and health emergencyes can easily prevent employees from seeking new places to work.
These are systemic problems in the industry, though. Leaving google will almost certainly place you in a company where the situation is worse, and where the ability to set industry standards is less.
As for the "it's not a democracy:" I ask why we tolerate that. In a country founded in individual freedoms, we're apparently ok with creating no-freedom zones that pretty much every adult has to spend half of their waking hours in.
> Leaving google will almost certainly place you in a company where the situation is worse
That is a baseless assumption. For me a toxic work culture is the worse situation.
The US was founded on the concept of liberty more so than on the concept of democracy, which is how we ended up with a federal republic and an electoral college. According to JS Mill the greatest enemy to liberty is a hostile majority.
>"These are systemic problems in the industry, though. Leaving google will almost certainly place you in a company where the situation is worse, and where the ability to set industry standards is less."
These issues seem to be particularly acute in Silicon Valley. "The industry" is much more than companies located in the Bay Area and Peninsula in Northern California. There is no shortage of companies out there that have zero tolerance for sexual harassment, who do not pursue projects related to censorship or the Pentagon. I know because I have worked at them. They are only worse than Google salary-wise. Let's not pretend that Google employee's primary concerns are trying to set "industry standards" or that they're somehow looking out for all of us.
The whole point of these actions is to avoid paper trails.
The political speech aspect of the matter is a red herring. The priority is suppressing contrarian contemplation in writing to avoid issues with litigation, etc.
Lawyers who are defendants want to preserve nothing. Lawyers who are plaintiffs want to retain every utterence ever made since the dawn of time.