There's an EXTREME amount of power imbalance between employer and employee; if employees have to fear retaliation for voicing their concerns it has a chilling effect.
I'm okay with consequences, but voicing your concerns in public isn't grounds for consequences.
Employees are signing up for a world where they don't wear significant risk in exchange for subordinating their decision making to a company.
Companies are fundamentally an organised group of people working to a common goal. I can understand very well if individual employees want to assert their individuality. However, at any moment, they have only and exactly 3 choices:
1) Cooperate enthusiastically.
2) Cooperate with complaint
3) Quit
Nobody is going to get sacked for quietly and politely voicing a concern. However, once employees start organising to influence management on business decisions they really need to pony up the capital and become shareholders. Deciding what management does is the privilege of shareholders, not employees.
Isn't this precisely describing why unions were originally generated, so that employees can also leverage power equal to the shareholders, and therefore have a say in their own working conditions?
This article is talking about:
* Amazon workers are demanding more action from the company on battling climate change
* Microsoft, employees say they don’t want to build technology for warfare
* Salesforce, a group has lobbied management to end its work with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency
* Google, [employees] want a say in and control over the products they build
Those are issues going way beyond what an employee can reasonably expect to influence. Being employed by a tech company is an achievement, but the end of the day tech workers aren't that special. They don't formally get to decide how the world works.
They absolutely can't take to social media to complain about these issues and expect to hold a job with the company they are complaining about. This type of activity isn't acceptable; they can't draw a wage and overrule strategic directions from people with capital at stake. The options are work or walk.