I think the primary reason for this is because people (generally speaking) in democratic societies share control of their government (for the people by the people etc). This is not true of company->employee relationships.

It is assumed that if you join a company you share their values and if you no longer share their values the barrier to leave and join another is quite low. People have different values and that is fine. Unless your employer is engaging in illegal behaviors, speaking out against their value set is just showing intolerance for other people and their values.

Move on, join up and use your time to help lift values you hold, don’t just spend all your time tearing down others. Respect the fact that others can have values different than your own.

This. A country is governed by its leaders for its people. The leaders have a responsibility to the people to act on their behalf in their benefit.

Companies are managed by an executive team on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the shareholders. Not the employees.

Shareholders can, and do, criticise management and demand they do things differently/better, because management is ultimately responsible to them. Likewise the people can, and do, criticse governments because the government is responsible to them.

Management are not responsible to employees. Though it makes sense to not annoy them too much. But if it's a question of shareholder or employee satisfaction, then legally there's no choice.

Seems to me you have an overly simplistic view of what a corporation is. A corporation is not merely its stockholders. A corporation is accountable to multiple stakeholders, and it's stockholders are just one of many such stakeholders. A corporation's employees and customers are also stakeholders, as well as the society and nation in which it is embedded. It is perfectly legitimate for any of the various stakeholders to attempt to influence the behavior of the corporation.

If you are for tolerance and the coexistance of different values in society, you will understand that values come into conflict constantly. And you will respect the prerogative of employees and customers to push back when their values conflict with corporation management (who represent stockholders).

When you insist that employees must unilaterally disarm by walking away at the first sign of conflict with their employers, you are essentially expressing a class preference. You are asserting that the working class must submit to the stockholding upper class. A corporation requires capital to compete in our economy. And when the top 10% own 80% of the wealth, workers cannot simply walk away.

Stockholders can't walk away either. They need workers, just as workers need capital. So they will need to find a way to coexist, but that doesn't mean there won't be conflict. There will always be conflict. The virtue of our democracy is that the conflict is manifested as demand letters and PR statements instead of clubs and bullets.

> It is assumed that if you join a company you share their values

More precisely, it is assumed that you share the values of the owners.

> Move on, join up and use your time to help lift values you hold, don’t just spend all your time tearing down others. Respect the fact that others can have values different than your own.

I see a big problem with this argument, would you say that to e.g. Belarussian freedom of speech activists? That hey, they should just respect their government has different values, and they can move elsewhere.

You're talking about "others", but you really mean "people in charge". I think it's morally wrong to exclude large majority of people, who are not in charge, from the discussion what should be the values of the collective they are part of.

> I see a big problem with this argument, would you say that to e.g. Belarussian freedom of speech activists?

I gave multiple points in my post as to why governments are different than companies (it was in fact the main point of my post). Please read it again.

Even in government, there are limits. To accomplish any meaningful results, you need to work with others and avoid faux pas

Try being a member of the Democrat (or Republican) party and openly criticize the leaders of the party. You would be immediately ostracized and none of your legislation or ideas would make it through again.

At the core, we are a social species that relies on cooperation. It is critical to have people constantly questioning the herd mentality so we don't run off the cliff. But the whistle-blowing can still be done in a respectful way (unless, of course, it is egregious like breaking laws, moral issues, etc).

In this case, even if you take a critical eye towards Google, they didn't want a paper that they paid for published externally. Tough. If you want free reign, you can't be part of an organization that pays your paycheck every two weeks.

Also note that this does not mean that the paper was not read and reviewed within Google and might have effected some change there. And it could have been published externally if she had taken the review comments into consideration and included some of the ways Google was trying to mitigate the problems - something that would actually be interesting and relevant to the paper

I don’t want to work activists, neither do the majority of my colleagues at Google that I speak with.

If you want to be an activist, go join a non-profit.

That's a strange position at a company whose board and top executives are huge political activists spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbying. Political activism is a big part of what Google does, and at a scale that exceeds many if not most non-profits.

Freedom of speech has always applied only to the freedom to say things without prosecution. Any extension of that idea into the private sector is completely ungrounded in what the law actually does.

The idea that we can’t criticize companies in a thread full of criticism of Google is just plain silly. Of course you can criticize companies. But if you’re criticizing your employer, you do have to accept the risk of there being private consequences. This has always been the case.

Heck, it’s not just limited to employers. If I was to walk into my local Starbucks and make a nuisance of myself by screaming, I’ll be banned. That’s not a violation of my free speech rights, nobody is prosecuting me, but it’s an obvious consequence of my speech.

Interestingly there are those who argue that use of social platforms as a consumer requires confining oneself within certain accepted bands of opinion unless you suddenly want your account shut down. As such employees being held to the same standard doesn't surprise me. Even more so due to the fact that "work" requires cooperation which requires some level of compliance.