It sounds like they're barricading themselves inside the office but in reality they are just exercising their local statutory rights. According to the article Google can't just fire them like that without wrongdoing on their part. But only suggest they leave and not all of them followed this suggestion.

If Google wants to do business there they'll have to follow local laws.

I don't know how else it would be possible but the article is not about people being laid off chaining themselves to theirs desks and refusing to leave the building. It's about google "suggesting" them to resign because the law does not allow them to be fired without cause. (This is the case in a lot places outside of the US).

Some contexts: South Korean labor laws have employee protection to the level close to EU. Basically you cannot fire employees without strong, urgent business justifications and you need to do best efforts to avoid layoff. Also you gotta negotiate with labor union if there's any with the majority of its employees, not sure if this is applicable to this case though, as the union seems small.

This is quite a headache for employers, so most companies begin with voluntary/recommended resignation and you're typically going to have a good number of employees who's okay to accept that with good severance packages. The problem is that Google doesn't want to give it. I think >$100B cash reserve is meant to be something, but their execs might have different opinions?

How does this normally work when a Korean business needs to downsize? Is there sort of a cultural understanding of the need and the employees sort out together which ones with accept the resignation offer? Five employees sounds like a really low limit and like an affected business could be quite small, so what happens if business slows down enough that not all 6 employees can be paid, but none of them want to go?

Are the rules different too when the business itself needs to close? Or do the 6 employees have some kind of opportunity to take over the business if they don't want to be terminated?

I'm really interested in understanding more about this model, because it's so different from the "at-will employment" that I'm used do, and used to seeing higher-ups in companies defend as the only workable way.

I wonder what kind of resignation package Google is offering, in these countries where it can't just arbitrarily fire people.

Google discover that not all countries have the same laws about work than the US

"Recommended resignation" sounds to me like the best employees will leave immediately (because they have alternatives lined up) and you're left with only those employees who expect that it'll be difficult to find another job, for example because those are the low performers.

In some countries you can't fire people unless you can prove they did something wrong.

Hideously evil company