There's no academic freedom expected - that's private R&D work, the research and the paper is done on behalf of the company and wholly owned by it, not the employees who did it, and so your boss naturally has full control on when, how, where and if that research should be published.

It's just as if you'd want to open source some code that you wrote for your job, and suddenly the boss says "hey, don't do that" - there are many reasons why they might want to not publish it, and it's not your code to publish as you want.