12 ms·

My god, people need to calm down. I understand that some may be upset about things their employer does and that's well within their rights. If their employer is

by pontus 6y ago

My god, people need to calm down. I understand that some may be upset about things their employer does and that's well within their rights. If their employer is knowingly engaging in illegal activity then by all means, be a whistle blower and set ultimatums, but this has gone too far. If you have a problem with the motivations of your employer or how it handles various sensitive issues then start preparing for interviews and leave the company! I find it sort of humorous how there are companies out there that are actually doing some pretty bad stuff that somehow don't have these problems. For example, I don't hear a lot about the walkouts at Exxon or at Raytheon. For fun reading, here are the companies that the Norwegian wealth fund refuses to invest in because of ethical concerns (they recently removed Raytheon from this list when they exited the business of cluster bombs): https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/responsible-investment/exclusion-of-companies/ https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/responsible-investment/exclu...

guerrilla 6y ago
> this has gone too far Hardly. It's all part of the negotations. Leaving is just the resort. There's no reason not to protest before it gets to that point.
adamsea 6y ago
> but this has gone too far. Honest question - which part has gone too far? Feel like there are currently a lot of parts.
js8 6y ago
> I understand that some may be upset about things their employer does and that's well within their rights. It is within their rights, true. But it's not just a question of law, but also ethics. We accept that, in democratic societies, we can freely criticize our government and still stay the citizens. There are good principal and practical reasons to have it so. However, in private companies, for some reason, we don't accept it.
- jjcon 6y ago
  I think the primary reason for this is because people (generally speaking) in democratic societies share control of their government (for the people by the people etc). This is not true of company->employee relationships. It is assumed that if you join a company you share their values and if you no longer share their values the barrier to leave and join another is quite low. People have different values and that is fine. Unless your employer is engaging in illegal behaviors, speaking out against their value set is just showing intolerance for other people and their values. Move on, join up and use your time to help lift values you hold, don’t just spend all your time tearing down others. Respect the fact that others can have values different than your own.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    This. A country is governed by its leaders for its people. The leaders have a responsibility to the people to act on their behalf in their benefit. Companies are managed by an executive team on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the shareholders. Not the employees. Shareholders can, and do, criticise management and demand they do things differently/better, because management is ultimately responsible to them. Likewise the people can, and do, criticse governments because the government is responsible to them. Management are not responsible to employees. Though it makes sense to not annoy them too much. But if it's a question of shareholder or employee satisfaction, then legally there's no choice.
  - js8 6y ago
    > It is assumed that if you join a company you share their values More precisely, it is assumed that you share the values of the owners. > Move on, join up and use your time to help lift values you hold, don’t just spend all your time tearing down others. Respect the fact that others can have values different than your own. I see a big problem with this argument, would you say that to e.g. Belarussian freedom of speech activists? That hey, they should just respect their government has different values, and they can move elsewhere. You're talking about "others", but you really mean "people in charge". I think it's morally wrong to exclude large majority of people, who are not in charge, from the discussion what should be the values of the collective they are part of.
GVIrish 6y ago
People certainly could just quit when they feel their company is not doing the right thing. But people who care about their mission and the company might stay and do something like this because they genuinely want to improve things. Maybe if more employees used their leverage to improve companies from within we could see real progress in work environments and corporate ethics without having to wait on legislation or lawsuits to force companies to change.
- claydavisss 6y ago
  Their "mission" is to find conflict, or lacking that, create it. What is the "mission" otherwise? The entire field of "Ethical AI" is a total joke that serves as nothing but a conduit to inject college-grade identity politics into the work environment. There is literally nothing else to this field. Frankly Google should terminate the entire team.
- zug_zug 6y ago
  Agreed. Sometimes we like to pretend that "corporations" are entities themselves, but the truth is they are just groups of people. The people have all the power, and all the accountability.
- pontus 6y ago
  Yes, I think if people were really trying to improve their companies from within that's a great idea. I don't think that's what's happening here though. I like to pose the following thought experiment to people who like driving fancy cars: if your car looked like an old honda civic from the outside but had all the bells and whistles and looked stunning from the inside, would you still want it? The point of the experiment is to show that a nontrivial part of the reason why people drive fancy cars is the signal that it sends to other people. Similarly here, if there was a mechanism to improve a company from within that was anonymous so that you wouldn't get any credit whatsoever for it's improvement, would they use it? It's human nature to want credit, so I wouldn't blame people for not wanting to use it, but let's be honest about there being a nontrivial part to all of this that is founded in virtue signaling and in-group/out-group tribalism).
  - 6y ago
zug_zug 6y ago
>> For example, I don't hear a lot about the walkouts at Exxon or at Raytheon. Maybe the world would be a better place if we did. At least "My god, people need to calm down." isn't really an argument.
- coward8675309 6y ago
  Maybe works like Faust have deep resonance with people because we all make deals with the devil and are conflicted and make choices that balance not good vs evil or even evil vs some other evil but a whole menu of ambiguous options against each other. It's the self-righteous who are the real enemies, not the people who knowingly make the best of whatever resigned compromises they find themselves forced to make.
- istjohn 6y ago
  Exactly. When did indifference and apathy become a virtue?
AntiImperialist 6y ago
>Norwegian wealth fund refuses to invest in because of ethical concerns It's not ethical concerns. It's competition concerns veiled as ethical ones.
pron 6y ago
> but this has gone too far. If you have a problem with the motivations of your employer or how it handles various sensitive issues then start preparing for interviews and leave the company! Why? It might be true that in the US the system is such that corporations are the property of their shareholders to do with as they please within the law, but that is a construct of a specific political process (e.g. [1]), and a different political process, like the one these employees are now engaging in could result in a different, possibly better outcome. If the law is your only guidance, then the law allows workers to protest management decisions, even publicly, just as much as it allows them to quit. If management is allowed to do anything it wants as long as it's legal, so can employees. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...
- coward8675309 6y ago
  This makes no sense to me. If you don't believe in the raison d'être of a company, you should not join the company. There is no need to delve deeply into competing theories of the corporation. I'm willing to bet that even over in Europe, Ruger, Sig, Glock, Walther, and Beretta don't have a ton of gadflies on staff who are paid to write papers calling for the outlaw of handguns.
  - pron 6y ago
    It's possible that the company's values or behaviour have changed, but, more importantly, the decision to work at a company is mutual: both sides want it (the company expects the value an employee will bring exceeds the cost of their employment; hiring someone is not a charity), and they enter into this relationship when neither side knows everything about the other, certainly not how they would behave in the future. Just as the company can and does exert pressure on employees to do something they might not want, so can the employees try and exert pressure on the company to change a decision.
    - coward8675309 6y ago
      I don't disagree with you. I was at an adtech startup, and I had bright lines — no payday loans or for-profit education. Luckily we never needed to blur or cross those lines, but as our business evolved, the way I delivered my — and my colleagues delivered their— preferences was not through laying down ultimatums but by having conversations. Some people seem intent on creating drama and casting things not as their preferences but as Epic Struggles Between Good and Evil, where people who don't share their preferences are Evil. These people may not be offended by this characterization! Life is complicated. I re-watched Schindler's List the other day, and assuming for a moment it's historically accurate, one could argue that by laboring in the factory, the workers were aiding the war effort and trading their own temporary safety for the lives of the people who would be victims of a Nazi war machine fed out of the factory's enamel pots. If someone were to actually argue that, I would just sort of stare at them like there were insane, despite not knowing how to rebut the argument except by blurting our words like "nuance" and "perspective" and "balance."
dannyw 6y ago
Why? Maybe this is my Australian worldview, but if my company is doing unethical things, here is my progression: 1. Speak up internally. 2. Speak up externally. 3. Speak to the media. Do you think the Uber sexual harassment whistleblower should have kept quiet?
- themaninthedark 6y ago
  Sexual harassment is illegal, that is very different from something you find unethical. eg. Disabling safety equipment so that a job can be completed faster - illegal Locating toys and candy to low shelves at registers so that children see them and nag their parents to buy them, increasing sales. - unethical in my view but called good marketing by many others.

by pontus 6y ago

guerrilla 6y ago

> this has gone too far Hardly. It's all part of the negotations. Leaving is just the resort. There's no reason not to protest before it gets to that point.

adamsea 6y ago

> but this has gone too far. Honest question - which part has gone too far? Feel like there are currently a lot of parts.

js8 6y ago

> I understand that some may be upset about things their employer does and that's well within their rights. It is within their rights, true. But it's not just a question of law, but also ethics. We accept that, in democratic societies, we can freely criticize our government and still stay the citizens. There are good principal and practical reasons to have it so. However, in private companies, for some reason, we don't accept it.

jjcon 6y ago
I think the primary reason for this is because people (generally speaking) in democratic societies share control of their government (for the people by the people etc). This is not true of company->employee relationships. It is assumed that if you join a company you share their values and if you no longer share their values the barrier to leave and join another is quite low. People have different values and that is fine. Unless your employer is engaging in illegal behaviors, speaking out against their value set is just showing intolerance for other people and their values. Move on, join up and use your time to help lift values you hold, don’t just spend all your time tearing down others. Respect the fact that others can have values different than your own.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  This. A country is governed by its leaders for its people. The leaders have a responsibility to the people to act on their behalf in their benefit. Companies are managed by an executive team on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the shareholders. Not the employees. Shareholders can, and do, criticise management and demand they do things differently/better, because management is ultimately responsible to them. Likewise the people can, and do, criticse governments because the government is responsible to them. Management are not responsible to employees. Though it makes sense to not annoy them too much. But if it's a question of shareholder or employee satisfaction, then legally there's no choice.
- js8 6y ago
  > It is assumed that if you join a company you share their values More precisely, it is assumed that you share the values of the owners. > Move on, join up and use your time to help lift values you hold, don’t just spend all your time tearing down others. Respect the fact that others can have values different than your own. I see a big problem with this argument, would you say that to e.g. Belarussian freedom of speech activists? That hey, they should just respect their government has different values, and they can move elsewhere. You're talking about "others", but you really mean "people in charge". I think it's morally wrong to exclude large majority of people, who are not in charge, from the discussion what should be the values of the collective they are part of.

GVIrish 6y ago

People certainly could just quit when they feel their company is not doing the right thing. But people who care about their mission and the company might stay and do something like this because they genuinely want to improve things. Maybe if more employees used their leverage to improve companies from within we could see real progress in work environments and corporate ethics without having to wait on legislation or lawsuits to force companies to change.

claydavisss 6y ago
Their "mission" is to find conflict, or lacking that, create it. What is the "mission" otherwise? The entire field of "Ethical AI" is a total joke that serves as nothing but a conduit to inject college-grade identity politics into the work environment. There is literally nothing else to this field. Frankly Google should terminate the entire team.
zug_zug 6y ago
Agreed. Sometimes we like to pretend that "corporations" are entities themselves, but the truth is they are just groups of people. The people have all the power, and all the accountability.
pontus 6y ago
Yes, I think if people were really trying to improve their companies from within that's a great idea. I don't think that's what's happening here though. I like to pose the following thought experiment to people who like driving fancy cars: if your car looked like an old honda civic from the outside but had all the bells and whistles and looked stunning from the inside, would you still want it? The point of the experiment is to show that a nontrivial part of the reason why people drive fancy cars is the signal that it sends to other people. Similarly here, if there was a mechanism to improve a company from within that was anonymous so that you wouldn't get any credit whatsoever for it's improvement, would they use it? It's human nature to want credit, so I wouldn't blame people for not wanting to use it, but let's be honest about there being a nontrivial part to all of this that is founded in virtue signaling and in-group/out-group tribalism).
- 6y ago

zug_zug 6y ago

>> For example, I don't hear a lot about the walkouts at Exxon or at Raytheon. Maybe the world would be a better place if we did. At least "My god, people need to calm down." isn't really an argument.

coward8675309 6y ago
Maybe works like Faust have deep resonance with people because we all make deals with the devil and are conflicted and make choices that balance not good vs evil or even evil vs some other evil but a whole menu of ambiguous options against each other. It's the self-righteous who are the real enemies, not the people who knowingly make the best of whatever resigned compromises they find themselves forced to make.
istjohn 6y ago
Exactly. When did indifference and apathy become a virtue?

AntiImperialist 6y ago

>Norwegian wealth fund refuses to invest in because of ethical concerns It's not ethical concerns. It's competition concerns veiled as ethical ones.

pron 6y ago

> but this has gone too far. If you have a problem with the motivations of your employer or how it handles various sensitive issues then start preparing for interviews and leave the company! Why? It might be true that in the US the system is such that corporations are the property of their shareholders to do with as they please within the law, but that is a construct of a specific political process (e.g. [1]), and a different political process, like the one these employees are now engaging in could result in a different, possibly better outcome. If the law is your only guidance, then the law allows workers to protest management decisions, even publicly, just as much as it allows them to quit. If management is allowed to do anything it wants as long as it's legal, so can employees. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...

coward8675309 6y ago
This makes no sense to me. If you don't believe in the raison d'être of a company, you should not join the company. There is no need to delve deeply into competing theories of the corporation. I'm willing to bet that even over in Europe, Ruger, Sig, Glock, Walther, and Beretta don't have a ton of gadflies on staff who are paid to write papers calling for the outlaw of handguns.
- pron 6y ago
  It's possible that the company's values or behaviour have changed, but, more importantly, the decision to work at a company is mutual: both sides want it (the company expects the value an employee will bring exceeds the cost of their employment; hiring someone is not a charity), and they enter into this relationship when neither side knows everything about the other, certainly not how they would behave in the future. Just as the company can and does exert pressure on employees to do something they might not want, so can the employees try and exert pressure on the company to change a decision.
  - coward8675309 6y ago
    I don't disagree with you. I was at an adtech startup, and I had bright lines — no payday loans or for-profit education. Luckily we never needed to blur or cross those lines, but as our business evolved, the way I delivered my — and my colleagues delivered their— preferences was not through laying down ultimatums but by having conversations. Some people seem intent on creating drama and casting things not as their preferences but as Epic Struggles Between Good and Evil, where people who don't share their preferences are Evil. These people may not be offended by this characterization! Life is complicated. I re-watched Schindler's List the other day, and assuming for a moment it's historically accurate, one could argue that by laboring in the factory, the workers were aiding the war effort and trading their own temporary safety for the lives of the people who would be victims of a Nazi war machine fed out of the factory's enamel pots. If someone were to actually argue that, I would just sort of stare at them like there were insane, despite not knowing how to rebut the argument except by blurting our words like "nuance" and "perspective" and "balance."

dannyw 6y ago

Why? Maybe this is my Australian worldview, but if my company is doing unethical things, here is my progression: 1. Speak up internally. 2. Speak up externally. 3. Speak to the media. Do you think the Uber sexual harassment whistleblower should have kept quiet?

themaninthedark 6y ago
Sexual harassment is illegal, that is very different from something you find unethical. eg. Disabling safety equipment so that a job can be completed faster - illegal Locating toys and candy to low shelves at registers so that children see them and nag their parents to buy them, increasing sales. - unethical in my view but called good marketing by many others.