With Gaza-War-related protests flaring up on a rapidly increasing number of US college campuses and at some corporate headquarters, we’ve been asking experts what the best practices are for business leaders to prepare and find the right approach should tensions mount in their own workplaces.
Google provides a specific example of what could arise. Last week, employees affiliated with the group No Tech for Apartheid staged sit-ins at the company’s offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California. Organizers called on the tech giant to end its joint contract with Amazon to provide cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli government. When the employees sitting in refused to leave, the company called local law enforcement, who arrested nine employees, and Google has since fired 50 employees associated with the protests, according to protest organizers.
“We are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a note to employees. It’s notable that he specified debating politics was outside of the bounds of what’s allowed at Google.
Google’s tactics against employees may come back to bite them, warns Thomas Kochan, a post-tenure professor at MIT Sloan School of Management. “It's laying the foundation for the next set of protests and for inflaming concerns of employees,” he explains. “They may be able to suppress any particular action at one point in time, but they won't be able to suppress the interest of employees having a voice.”
Amid a backdrop of an empowered and activated workforce, continued anti-war organizing in communities across the country, and a presidential election just months away, what’s a better alternative to respond to potential employee protests? Here’s where to start, based on our conversations with Kochan and other experts on employee activism.