If anything it sounded like they disagreed with the company's business direction. Leaders listened, made some changes.
They still disagreed...this time with leadership not feeling a change was necessary.
they then quit as they disagreed with the company's direction.
Regardless of how, as long as what your protesting the right things everything else doesn’t matter?
That's retaliation.
If Google fired someone for speaking up against an incident of harassment that would be a huge story in the media.
And if you listen to what they're actually saying, they're alleging retaliation, not merely disagreeing with the direction the company is going on.
I also don’t like being told I support sexual harassment because I don’t think highly politicized work environments (note I said work environment not society) are a healthy environment. That’s a dirty tactic.
Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_pay_for_equal_work
(IANAL.) Gender discrimination, and sexual harassment in the workplace are against the law in California. I believe the law also protects against retaliation for claims of violations of these things. This is hardly "bringing politics to work".
Violence on the other hand also has no place in the work environment. Which is why harassment of all forms isn’t tolerated.
These people, regardless of what they thought they were doing, weren't blowing the whistle on anything because they failed to highlight any illegal behaviour.
Remember that Google is the company that initiated a massive review of pay to try and uncover this supposedly widespread sexist underpaying of women. It discovered it was underpaying men and had to adjust men's pay upwards.
Likewise their big walkout was triggered by the fact that Andy Rubin was fired, but also paid money, after a woman he was in a consensual relationship with discovered he was cheating and made an (unverifiable) accusation against him. But this isn't Google tolerating sexual harassment in any legal sense of the term.
So what makes you think the law has anything to do with their protests?
Didn't Google just discover that they actually paid men less than women? Oopsie.
The main criticism of equal compensation is listed in the Wikipedia page in the first sentences under the title Criticism: the methodology by which the gap is measured.
For example, a common argument is that together with a pay gap there is a similar gap in worked hours, about 1hr on average for full time employees in the same workplace for the same job. Then people tend to dip into discussions about gender roles and bit by bit move the discussion further into the realm of politics.
Equal compensation is thus politics. Not because people disagree on the principle, nor because we don't have a data, but because people will disagree on the interpretation and then jump into political topics in order to support their interpretation.
If you were up-front about this, you'd say "harassment and discrimination are political issues that shouldn't be organized around". Of course, that argument wouldn't carry well here. But it'd be more intellectually honest.
I just fixed a bug involving a typo in a regular expression. Do you think that was political? If so, I'd like to see how. If not, I'd like to know how to tell what is political apart from what is not political.
Protesting against something doesn't magically turn you into a superior person that is exempt from mundane things like being fired or being disliked.