> There isn't any restriction to prevent any employee from using a non-employer email system for organizing the very same activities.

Actually, in some cases there is. By using third-party email systems employees might violate non-disclosure agreements or company rules, which would in turn give the company cause for direct termination.

The fact that their employer made special deals with people accused of sexual harrassment or wanted to work on military projects are employment related matters.

As a corporate leader what is more important: allowing employees to use employer resources for personal politics or solving for toxic/hostile behavior?

The answer is that being a human with moral and ethical obligations to the rest of humanity should take precedence over being a corporate leader. If you don't sell censorship and weapons tech or cut backroom deals to silence victims of sexual harassment, there's no need to try to stop your employees from talking about it.

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.

They don't own the company.

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.

It is illegal for an employer to prevent workers from discussing working conditions.

There are laws that cover this stuff. A company is not a "democracy", but it does have to follow the law.

That's just, like, your opinion man. Other people have different political opinions.

The progressive majority were all for firing people for political beliefs as long as it was people they disagreed with... now they're aghast at the abstract concept of it?

What is important is that the corporate leader shouldn't break the law by preventing people from discussing working conditions.

Discussing working conditions is a legal right, and it is illegal to prevent this.

It isn't nearly as easy to connect to people outside the workplace. You have to reach out to people to get their personal contact details, and doing this en-masse could be construed as organizing activity by itself. They could even argue you are ex-filtrating confidential information (list of employees).

> It isn’t nearly as easy to connect to people outside the workplace.

I think this is absolute core of the discussion. Like nearly all bad decisions ultimately it comes down to convenience. If this form of political discourse were as important as people claim they would find a way.

You know, unless the difficulty of doing without it makes it infeasible.

Mobility impaired people lobbied for curb cutouts waybackwhen because it would make it easier to use sidewalks. I think that situation obviously shouldn't be belittled by saying it's about convenience. Ugh, if going to the grocery store were as important as they claim they would find a way /s.

I'm not convinced this particular situation isn't also about feasibility.

Accessibility is justified by equal access or anti-discrimination, which isn't the same as convenience. As an accessibility advocate I find that equivalence either insulting or grossly misinformed. This conversation isn't about equal access. Trying to warp it into such is insulting.

> This conversation isn't about equal access.

You're right. It's about workers rights. I'm telling you that I think construing the ability of workers to effectively organize as a convenience is also an insulting stance. In fact, I'm glad I chose an example that you find important. Maybe you can consider the possibility that there is a higher principle at work, maybe one that is as important to society as equal access is.

> Maybe you can consider the possibility that there is a higher principle at work

I would have started with that. At this point you are shifting ground to qualify an indefensible position on a topic that isn't that important.

The only purpose of my example was to show that in general the implication that ease of use reduces to convenience is false. I used an obvious counterexample. In summary, to imply that I think your assertion that it's about convenience is unjustified and off-base. If you think I was drawing an equivalence between the two situations, then I apologize for not being clear.

I don't understand the tendency to fix markets by "organizing". I wish there was more of an attraction to work with the market. Just quit and work somewhere else. Spread your ideas and persuade others to do the same. It's a lot healthier in my opinion for all involved, not to mention the consumers of the product.

This opinion reflects a particular kind of career and living situation. If you rent and work in a field that has many options per city, and/or remote work, things are fine. I've heard it said that programming is an industry that favors lateral movement.

On the other hand, if you own a house and the economy has tanked to where it's worth less than you owe on it, and you work for a large company that is a unique industry in that town, your options are limited. If they gouge you (see history on "the company store") you're screwed. Hence unions are far more important in certain industries than others.

I'm familiar with that argument. My take is that I don't make much of a distinction between a worker and an entrepreneur. I think the healthiest approach is for everyone to see their personal financial journey the same as if it were a business. The situation of owning (or rather heavy leveraging the purchase of) a house and working for a company that is unique in the town, etc. is the result of a series of risk/reward decisions that were made. Sometimes they're made well and pay off and sometimes they're not and end up biting you.

For those that have a particular lack of innate ability for making good decisions (for whatever reason), I would rather see the community have a sense of responsibility to work with them to provide assistance either proactively (to keep them out of trouble) or retroactively (to keep them afloat after disasters). Without the community approach, it seems like the alternative is to allow compromises to principles - in this case the temptation to manage the market. Theoretically that's not the end of the world, but in practice what I feel happens is that bad actors are hanging around these doors egging others to crack them open. And as soon as that happens, they rush in and take advantage of it.

A counter perspective to this: what is a company? Is it not a group of people organized with a central purpose? So to discourage or ban other forms of organizing that may overlap this organization is actually the compromise of principles in this case. A union is just another group of people making an agreement together. The difference is, the company is organized by, and empowers, the person at the top. The union is organized by, and empowers, the workers. I don't see how they're different or how it can be legal or ethical to silence one type of group. As to what particular actions either group can legally or ethically demand of its members, that's where the real discussion begins.

Edit to elaborate:

I'd go so far as to say that companies getting larger or merging is a form of collusion. Say you have 10 small companies that each need one programmer. They are in competition. They each have to pay a fair wage in hopes of snagging you. Say they all merge. Sure, there's a global marketplace for the hotshot programmers still, but they have drastically reduced the local competition. If they're still hiring 10 programmers, they have much more power now because there are 9 fewer alternatives to consider, both for bargaining power and for information about the market.

The solution to this, as companies get to, say, Amazon or Google size, is one of two things. You can have government regulation, like the antitrust suits or minimum wage laws, or you can have the workers do their own form of collusion by forming unions for collective bargaining. Of the two, the latter is much more libertarian in spirit.

Yes, a company is a group of people organized with a central purpose. However, companies are not allowed to coordinate with each other to fix pricing or availability or other terms. Nor are they allowed to take actions that shut non-coordinating companies out of the market. I may be wrong, but it is my understanding that unions do not have these constraints and, in fact, the reason they are even legal is due to statutory exemptions from anti-trust law that makes that combination of "purpose" an option. So to me, it's not an apple to apple comparison. And that's the problem of principle that I have. I don't think a market operates well when the ability to fix it is granted to some parts but not others.

The comparison to me would be operating only within a single company. I don't think there's anything stopping a group of employees from using whatever bargaining value they have to move the company in one direction or another - whether it's pay, working conditions, product development, etc.

What you say about unions having fewer constraints is interesting. I think it's important that both sides be made to play fair in such things, and the laws could use a review. I just think in principle unions are important in certain industries due to the structure of the industries themselves. Especially ones with a centralized nature, such as trains, electricity, cable TV, and fossil fuels. That unions are important in these areas is shown by them having a longer, stronger history of such.

I think you were composing your edit as I was composing my reply. I'm with you completely on companies that merge being a form of collusion in many cases. I believe that the US government needs to act on anti-trust way more than it does. Not a fan of wage controls because to me that's an indirect approach. But yea, collusion is really damaging - at whatever level.

Making matters worse, if you talk a big game about allowing free and open discussion and then make a big show of firing people for expressing views that are too right-of-center, you’ve thrown your institutional weight in the direction of radicalizing the left wing.

>If you cannot be honest in the work place then its a hostile work environment...

Not sure I would go that far. I mean how many people are honest about how they feel about their boss? But is that "dishonesty" or just "professionalism".

I'd say that you have to be professional. There should be some sort of a sanctioned mechanism or forum for giving professional criticism.

But yeah, if all a guy or gal wants to do is spout off some expletive laden rant, then that's not really helpful for anyone. Least of all the other employees.