this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Never worked for one of the big tech firms, but I have been in the working world for ~16 years and one of the few things anyone that has been around for awhile can and will agree on is you don't talk about salary within earshot of the boss, you don't badmouth company decisions within earshot of the boss, you don't talk about politically charged topics, and you certainly don't combine 2 of those 3 and protest company decisions on politically charged issues literally in the office.
You also don't do those things on company provided equipment, software, or services. If you want to bitch about something the company is doing, you go out to lunch or do it after hours, preferably without written or video evidence.
While I think it is gross that Google fired them for this, given the history of the company almost encouraging such things, I can say these people just got a hard lesson that most of us learn about the corporate world long before we make it to working for the likes of Google.
Rightly or wrongly freedom of speech, assembly, etc protects you from the Government, not your boss. And your boss is a petty little ego maniac that controls your livelihood, so best to stay out of his gaze on matters you know he/she would view negatively where at all possible.
All of which is a problem, not something we should passively accept as the status quo. These employees were advocating for change to fix exactly those sorts of problems.
Unless the goal is to make a political statement with your departure.
exactly, which is what those workers did, they could've just resigned but they wanted to make a political statement and they did so
Or, do these things all the time if you can base your working hours around making your company more money.
They weren't just making a random protest. It was intended to show leadership their dissatisfaction. When your company is the size of tens of thousands of employees, your only real way to get within earshot is something like a protest.
Tired of this. The 1st amendment protects you from the government, but the idea of "freedom of speech" is much broader than that. We are allowed to be dissatisfied with how speech is suppressed even if a government is not involved.
And like it or not they are allowed to fire you for voicing that dissatisfaction. Don't like it? Protesting the company is the wrong seat of power to point your dissatisfaction at. "Freedom of speech" says you can say what you want, but does not mean you are free from the consequences of that speech either when it comes to your dealings with non-government bodies.