they have still succeeded at their actual objective of getting rid of the activist employees.Activists often get a free pass. So long as they're saying the "right thing," the press covers for them. Since anyone can just put out their slate and become an "activist," this creates a situation where random people people are given enough power to abuse and basically no oversight.
What if we had a society where Doctors got a free pass? What if there were no qualifications, and random people could call themselves doctors? So long as they're saying the "right thing," the press covers for them. Since anyone can just put out their slate and become a "Doctor," this creates a situation where random people people are given enough power to abuse and basically no oversight.
We have historical precedents for this. What you get are the moral equivalents of wild west medicine shows.
Further symptoms: When you start giving [X] a free pass, you'd start to see a degradation in the follower's understanding of morality, ethics, and fundamental principles which have far-reaching game theoretic consequences. These consequences aren't that easy to understand, so we'd expect to see people do shortsighted things which bring about those consequences. One would expect to see an ethos of totalitarian obeisance in [X] groups replace an ethos of free inquiry. One would expect to see forms of bigotry and the shallow judging of people by surface characteristics, sneaking in while disguised as other names. One would expect to see some scummy people who latched onto the moniker of [X] for a variety of reasons, who later on show their true colors.
One would expect to see the behavior of the mob.
Presumably the companies think they’re getting a reasonably good deal out of firing the organisers.
Some activists are genuinely speaking truth to power. Some are exploiters. Some are somewhere in between. There need to be checks and balances. The fundamental right of free association isn't so bad a place to start.