I know it's fun to hate on the big tech companies recently and act like they are bullies (and indeed in many ways they are), but this is a bad example of that. Most companies I know of would outright fire you if you, against explicit company policy, went to the press and started badmouthing your employer. The fact that Amazon only gave her a warning is the only surprising thing in this article.
If your stance is that Amazon's policy regarding public speaking is wrong, then that again is your opinion. I reached out to a friend who knows about Amazon's public speaking policy. The policy does not prevent employees from speaking to the press, nor does it prevent employees from speaking negatively about Amazon. It actually even says that talking publicly about an employee's experience working at Amazon is encouraged as long as you say that "this opinion is my own and not my company's".
The policy does also say that employees must get prior approval before speaking publicly on behalf of the company or before sharing confidential information. I personally see absolutely nothing wrong with this policy, and the employee in question definitely violated that. She explicitly identifies herself as "an Amazon insider" in her interview with TechCrunch where she then goes on to talk about Amazon's effort regarding climate change.
If I had to guess, I would say that this phrase is probably what got her into trouble. No company would be happy if one of their employees, without prior approval, represented themselves as an "insider" giving special information to the press, and I don't blame the company for that or see anything wrong with enforcing policies against that (except in cases of actual whistleblowing, which this is not).
> In cases where strikes are illegal, they are made so because voters have determined that it is in society's best interest to make them so.
Laws are seldom (never?) passed by popular vote, and I highly doubt this hypothetical outcome would occur if the question was ever presented to the people. Citizens have little say in legislative matters except when given a choice between 2-3 representatives, the winner of which gets the power to vote in their stead. This obviously makes it easier to influence the legislative process, since you only need to influence the representative and not all their constituents. The representatives are completely unaccountable until they're up for re-election, which occurs every 2-6 years. Passing a law can be done in much less time with zero input from citizens. So using the law as a basis for social approval of policy is obviously moot.
Another point: she never claims to speak for Amazon. Being an Amazon insider doesn't automatically imply that they are a spokesperson for Amazon, it just means they have access to information which does not exist outside Amazon. Your reading of this seems quite charitable to Amazon's case for seemingly no good reason.
Lastly, "confidential information" is often dubiously and vaguely defined to capture all information classified by laws as confidential, but also a lot more than that based on what the company thinks is bad PR. Take for instance the Google controversies last year regarding Search in China and image processing for military drones. When you give a single company the power to both define and enforce what falls under that umbrella, you can't expect them to do anything but use it to benefit the bottom line. This is the reason we have oversight bodies at all.
On the other hand, there’s been a rise in activist workers who believe they’re victims of authoritarianism whenever their subjective demands are not met immediately and in full. They often present themselves moral authorities, and by using an “appeal to authority” fallacy, they justify breaking policies, speaking on behalf of their coworkers, doxxing coworkers whom they don’t agree with, making false claims in the press, etc.
Whether or not I’m aligned with the underlying cause, the tactics and behavior on display has become increasingly indefensible.