The Boss Has Had It With All the Office Activists
It isn’t just Microsoft. Companies are adopting a new, harder-line playbook for dealing with political debate at work.
By
Chip Cutter
and
Lindsay Ellis
Aug. 28, 2025 8:35 pm ET
Company bosses are sounding a clarion call to office activists: Stop disrupting the workplace with your freedom of expression—or else.
Microsoft fired two more staffers Thursday for engaging in on-site protests against the company’s work with the Israeli military. The move, following the firing of two employees who occupied an executive’s office this week, is the latest example of business leaders cracking down on political dissent.
Alphabet’s Google last year called in police, then fired dozens of workers who engaged in a similar protest. Tesla ousted an employee after he created an anti-Elon Musk website and plastered his Cybertruck with protest slogans. Some companies are restricting even nonpolitical debate, as JPMorgan Chase did after an influx of employee comments complaining about the bank’s return-to-office mandate this year.
The new, hard-line playbook that companies are adopting to confront employee activism reflects two developments: One is a political climate in which companies risk the ire of the White House—and some consumers—if they appear to cater to “woke” forces, including their own staff. The other is an ever-tougher job market in which white-collar workers—especially in tech—have lost considerable leverage.
The result is a more adversarial employer-employee dynamic in which bosses are far less concerned with accommodating their workers’ political and personal views. These days, many business leaders would just as soon trim head count as appease vocal staff. That has fired up some office activists even more.
“The workers didn’t become more militant for fun,” said Mohamed Abdalla, a University of Alberta assistant professor, who has studied worker activism. Both companies and employee activists “are becoming more efficient and ruthless in their tactics.”
Some tech companies now include clauses in customer contracts noting that projects won’t be canceled amid worker pressure, Abdalla said. Veteran corporate strategists and executives say they have been struck, too, by companies’ willingness to call law enforcement to deal with workers. Many typically let corporate security handle such matters.
The stepped-up tactics are a far cry from the early days of the first Trump term, when dozens of CEOs joined their workforces in publicly protesting a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. In 2018, Ruth Porat, then Google’s chief financial officer, joined her finance team outside during a global walkout aimed at getting the technology giant to change its policies to make it safer for women to report instances of sexual harassment.
“Our company from inception was built with the concept that we should give employees voice,” Porat told The Wall Street Journal at the time.
Even when company bosses grew tired of all the political discussion on the job, a hot job market reined them in. In 2021, 37signals CEO Jason Fried issued a staff memo curbing “societal and political discussions” at work. The move triggered an uproar, and a wave of employees at the project-management and communication software company quit. Fried apologized a week later.
“The new policies stand, but we have some refining and clarifying to do,” he wrote in a blog post.
Now, Fried calls the move among the best decisions the company has ever made. 37signals reiterates its no-politics rule in job postings, and employees don’t bring up social or political issues in work discussions.
“It’s just all gone now,” he said. “We’re just focused on the work, which is what work should be.”
The Trump factor
Other executives are also more willing to shut down such conversations. Google CEO Sundar Pichai last year told staff the company wasn’t the place to debate politics, noting, “This is a business.” Salesforce executives, presented with a plan last year to add more human-resources staffers to help moderate internal discussions, instead created a new policy curbing talk of the war in Gaza in its Slack channels.
Microsoft’s moderators of internal message boards deleted questions and conversation threads related to Gaza and the company’s work with Israel, screenshots viewed by the Journal show. The company has said it takes action when content violates its policies and guidelines, and it aims to create an inclusive digital workplace.
Executives continue to struggle with how to respond to employee activism, corporate advisers say. Bosses want to create an environment where employees can speak up—within reason—and without disrupting operations. At all-hands meetings, some leaders have moved to pre-submitted questions from employees to avoid confrontations.
Leaders also know the White House is scrutinizing their responses.
The federal government has demanded hundreds of millions of dollars from college campuses deemed to have responded inadequately to pro-Palestinian protests. Law firms proactively struck deals with President Trump, pledging pro-bono legal services for causes supported by the administration. And the president has weighed in on corporate decision-making, as he did this week when he inserted himself into the debate about Cracker Barrel’s logo.
“Businesses are reluctant to enter the fold,” said Vincent Stanley, a longtime leader at the apparel brand Patagonia responsible for the company’s philosophy. Even at his company, which gives employees paid time off for activism, external messaging focuses on the environment, a longstanding commitment of executives.
“We’re sticking to our knitting—we’re not making broad statements about the administration,” he said.
‘You’re not a volunteer’
Jim Fielding, a former Disney executive who now coaches C-suite leaders, urges bosses to be transparent. When possible, he recommends sitting down with the heads of employee groups to understand their concerns.
“We have to treat them like adults and say, ‘What do you want me to do differently as your leader?’ ” Fielding said. The response, he said, should be: “If I can, I will. If I can’t, I’m going to tell you why.”
Likewise, employees inside U.S. companies don’t have the same freedom of expression that exists in other public forums, and workers need to remember they are paid to perform a job.
“You are an employee,” Fielding said. “You’re not a volunteer.”
Employees want to be acknowledged, and protests like sit-ins often come from employees not feeling heard, said James D. White, former chief executive of Jamba Juice and co-author of the forthcoming book “Culture Design.”
Younger generations are “holding us to account very, very differently, and it’s at our own peril if people are not listening,” he said, noting that trust erodes when companies don’t match their messaging with action.
A peer-reviewed paper by the University of Alberta’s Abdalla that will be published this fall found protest activities at Google and Microsoft peaked between 2015 and 2020. That period coincided with the first Trump administration, the #MeToo movement and a larger reckoning over corporate power and the treatment of workers.
No longer are bosses as likely to encourage employees to bring their “whole selves” to the office. Instead, many are taking a “1950s approach,” said Jenny Dearborn, chief people strategy officer at management consulting firm BTS and an author on HR issues.
“Work is work, outside life is outside life,” she said.
And for those who don’t get the message?
At more companies, Dearborn said, the answer is: “Shut it down.”
Write to Chip Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com and Lindsay Ellis at lindsay.ellis@wsj.com
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Appeared in the August 30, 2025, print edition as 'Bosses Are Fed Up With Office Activists'.
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