My sympathies end when you get exactly what you were asking for from your employer in a negotiation and you continue bad mouth them to the press.
Appeals to authority all the way down.
Sometimes, any strategy does become appropriate and justified if you haven't yet achieved the changes you want, depending on the issue at hand. At some point, being reasonable may no longer be an effective strategy.
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).
Don't trust internet randos, of course, but I preach what I practice and it has served me well in life.
How much should one be willing to sacrifice for the high road? Everything?
> 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.
Legal obstacles aside, though, it would be pretty clearly inappropriate in this case. If I'm an entry-level SWE looking to unionize, the principal designers are by any reasonable metric management; they're the ones who go around telling me what I should do and how I should do it, often more so than the person I actually report to in the org chart. I don't think any union representing line employees would let those employees' managers join.
We could say that about just about any major public policy move, now couldn't we? For example:
"In cases where the United States recklessly invades other countries, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and decades of instability -- as it did most recently in Iraq, for example -- it does so because voters have determined (indirectly, my electing leaders inclined to such actions) that it is in society's best interest to do so."
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.
The second part should be changed to that they're voting in the United State's best interests, which doesn't necessarily have to be society's best interest.
Some people are actually registered with an union but their challenge is to have people vote for them during compulsory elections for work councils.
Any employee can vite, and any employee can join a union. The mere fact of joining the union does not protect you form being fired (which by itself is very complicated in Europe where there are strong labour laws). The only people who are strongly protected are the ones who create a union, or are elected as a representative.