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The office exists within society. Some things exist everywhere you go in society. You don't give up ethics and morals because you cross the threshold of your pl

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• buzzy_hacker 5y ago
  I feel there is room in the middle. While we should not leave ethics at the door, not every ethical issue is applicable to work (as I’m sure you would agree.) So while it might be relevant to discuss “woke” issues like discrimination on group characteristics at work because that’s an issue that could manifest itself at work, I don’t think it’s relevant to call for a statement about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by Google, as is suggested in the article. Open-minded to contrary opinions though.
• ixacto 5y ago
  Advocating for what things exactly? It might be a strawman, but I’m going to guess and it would be something like an end to perceived workplace raceism/sexism/*isms. If you let in political advocacy movements from the left do you really want political movements from the right? Or is it just ok if the left is advocating for it? I kinda think the left is trying to have their equity cake and eat it too… To some people (I am not one of them at all, but I understand the argument) any abortion is literally murder, and it as a sincerely held belief as the recent movements like BLM and #metoo were. So do you really want to hear about abortion/guns/illegals/debt/satanism/furries in the workplace? This is just setting up workplaces for problems or maybe we can just realize work is for work?
  • hluska 5y ago
    Isn’t ending workplace sexism/racism a net benefit to the workplace? How are divisive, hate driven policies related?
    • somehwk 5y ago
      > Somehow implying that forced Critical Race Theory trainings are ending workplace sexism and racism instead of making it worse Yeah buddy, I agree, hate-driven divisive ideology has no business being forced on workers in the workplace, that's why people are pissed off about all this Woke crap
    • prewett 5y ago
      GP didn't say "end workplace sexism/racism", they said "end perceived workplace sexism/racism". The former could (arguably) have a definition of when we have arrived at this condition. The latter can never end, because someone can always perceive that it still exists (even if, objectively and hypothetically, it does not exist). Also, labeling the other side "divisive, hate driven" is not helpful. It's at least divisive itself, and it definitely does not invite understanding of the other side. But ultimately GP's point was that if you argue your side should be represented, you should consider whether you are okay with the other side also being represented. If not, maybe politics ought to stay out. (Or maybe the views should be moderated or rules of engagement enforced)
  • tshaddox 5y ago
    > To some people (I am not one of them at all, but I understand the argument) any abortion is literally murder, and it as a sincerely held belief as the recent movements like BLM and #metoo were. This as well as other parts of your comment seem to imply that you believe the sincerity or intensity with which one holds a particular belief is one of the most important factors in the merits of that belief. I personally do not think this is the case.
    • bhupy 5y ago
      This comment seems to imply that certain beliefs (ostensibly your own) are objective truths/facts that hold special merit. This is simply not the case.
• chairmanwow1 5y ago
  I worked at place like this at Lyft and to be honest it made me pretty uncomfortable. I was aligned with most people about most of the causes circulated freely, but not all. And on the items I wasn't fully onboard with the party line, I felt there was a huge risk to my job if I ever were to voice that. I won't ever work in an environment like that again. Once I cross the threshold with my coworkers to be friends I feel like there's a significant difference in what we are comfortable talking about with each other and certainly I expect to debate social causes with them at that point. Otherwise, I find it incredibly naive to expect consensus on any ideas, regardless of how fundamental they seem.
  • spamizbad 5y ago
    This sounds like a problem found in fancy valley tier-1 unicorns then. I keep hearing stories of people bombarded with political discussions on a daily basis and can hardly believe them. I'm not doubting anyone's sincerity but jeez... I feel like this perhaps localized to certain segments of the industry. I've worked in this industry for over a decade and really haven't had any major political discussions with coworkers outside of a few pertaining to extremely boring local politics. and I only engaged in them because I knew my colleague wasn't sensitive to the matter and it was out of earshot of any other coworkers (it was about zoning). (Also, as an aside, I find it painfully hypocritical anyone at a gig company like Lyft struts around the office being "woke" after what the company did with Prop 22)
    • Apocryphon 5y ago
      This is happening because these large tech companies- not just tier-1 unicorns but FAANGs themselves, have been presenting themselves as paternalistic employers for the past decade. You provide employees with all the free food, on-campus gyms, and massages by appointment as they want, then present them with supposedly open cultures of free inquiry, your employees are going to use it. You satiate someone's lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy, and they're going to want to self-actualize. So the freethinkers and activists motivated to join these companies are going to try to engage in activities beyond, well, work. So the companies reaped what they sowed. They wanted to have their employees stay at work and did so by making the office a desirable place to not only work but live at, and their employees start wanting to bring their lives into work. This totalistic capture of big tech over employee lifestyles mirrors what these companies are also seeking to do at the marketplace. When a company manages not only the technological needs of their customers, but everything from entertainment, to healthcare, to home security, to shopping, logistics, and everything else, then they set themselves up to be veritable empires. That's why big tech companies are now dealing with every issue including free speech, environmentalism, worker's rights, what activities should be eligible for payment services. That's just the price of being a business that wants to be involved in all facets of human society. It includes politics. You can't be an empire and still pretend to be above it all. Both your customers and your employees are going to treat you as one.
• newsclues 5y ago
  Critical race theory applies its lens to everything. School is racist, police are racist, government is racist, of course work and the office will become targets.
  • zdragnar 5y ago
    I am not sure I understand why people are downvoting / disagreeing with this. The pevasiveness and permanence of racism- indeed, the use of the term "whiteness" as a proxy for all social ills- is basically the core tenant of CRT.
    • bzbarsky 5y ago
      "Tenet", please, not "tenant".
      • zdragnar 5y ago
        Rodger that.
• geodel 5y ago
  > You don't give up ethics and morals because you cross the threshold of your place of business. Calling this rabid politics as 'ethics' and 'morals' is a neat trick. It is like calling "freedom to not air one's views', 'freedom to get fired for non PC views', 'freedom to be deplatformed' as actual freedom.
  • gnud 5y ago
    Well. You obviously have the freedom to not air your views. You have at-will employment in a lot of the US, so employers can fire you for any reason (except for some exceptions), or without a reason . I don't think this is a good thing, but there you are. This is a freedom for the employer. If you have a right to a platform (i.e to not be deplatformed), that obviously limits the freedom of the ones supplying the platform. So all of those points are actually freedoms, just not for the one being fired or deplatformed (the first point, freedom to be quiet, is obviously a freedom for the one keeping quiet. Maybe you meant something else?).
• acituan 5y ago
  > The office is exactly where we should be advocating for things, because it is where we spend the most time and can affect the most change. Just like we can't say "I should vote on other people's behalf because I know better", we also can't say "I should have more access to societal change because I am employed in an affluent organization". Otherwise it would be elitism 101. Office as a means of societal change doesn't provide equitable access to everyone in a democratic society. There is no such thing as democratic participation through back-channels. Playing politics in or around a megacorp is only popular because petite-bourgeois, frustrated with not actually being an elite and having any real control, try to co-opt hot button societal issues in the hopes that their political gesturing will be a status enhancer and grant them access to some power.
  • duped 5y ago
    That's not what I intended to say, I meant that within your office or team your voice is simply heard. Thats true regardless of how "affluent" an organization may be.
• jimmyswimmy 5y ago
  Oof. There isn't room to just go to work... to work? I want to go to the office and interact with people who are the best at what they do, I want my company to hire those people, and I expect them to hold me to equal standards. When the office was explicitly segregated, men vs women, black vs white, whatever,sure,they're could have been room for politics to change that in the workplace. It doesn't seem the same now. We hire the best people we can get,and we go to work to achieve a common aligned with whatever our work is. I'll deal with, or avoid, politics outside the workplace. I can't imagine trying to work through all the nuance of my personal political views with a coworker or, God forbid, an employee. How much would you enjoy discussing your potentially opposing political views with your boss? I trust him to be a good person, but once you pay that seed of doubt in someone's mind, things are never the same.
  • mplanchard 5y ago
    That would be nice for sure. I think that some people don’t get that privilege still by virtue of who they are. As a recent example that came up in my social circle, say you’re a woman in tech. It turns out that literally every single woman I know in tech has had to deal with at best unwanted propositions but more frequently outright harassment by their male coworkers. In situations like that, you can’t get away from “politics,” because the politically charged situations come to you. And I’d much rather work in a workplace where we make it clear, publicly, that that kind of behavior is unacceptable than one where we ignore it because we don’t want to talk politics at work.
    • CincinnatiMan 5y ago
      The connection to politics in your scenario isn’t clear to me. Are people having charged discussions on Slack about whether men should be allowed to harass women? I would think the scenario would be an open and shut case of going to associate relations to complain about the harassment. No real political discussion to be had.
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• eschaton 5y ago
  The poster you’re responding to may know and agree with all this as well, and that could be why they hold the position they do: They may be opposed to society changing.
• refurb 5y ago
  I agree 100%! Constitutional rights are a great example, those don’t stop when you enter the workplace and need to be protected 24/7. So no doubt you’ll be happy to sign my petition to further protect our 2nd amendment right to carry a concealed weapon at work! Yeah, right there, just sign. Oh you don’t support the constitution? When you said we should bring these fights to work you meant just the ones you support. Ohh....
  • duped 5y ago
    I'll be honest, I wouldn't care. The left as it seems you envision is not a monolith. But this is a good example! Gun policy (and the constitution itself) are legitimate political discussions that people can have without turning into a "fight." You can even educate or advocate either side in a civil way. You could even engage in advocacy for gun owners that get murdered by police, like Philando Castile.
    • refurb 5y ago
      Even if I support a cause I’d be annoyed if some coworker started asking me to sign a petition at work. And where does it stop? Petitions to stop chemtrails? Just keep that crap out of the workplace.
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• betwixthewires 5y ago
  I think its less of a "giving up your ethics and morals because you crossed the threshold" thing and more a "leave your coworkers the fuck alone" thing. Do you think it is a coincidence that this nonpolitical workplace thing is catching on right now, and not, say, 30 years ago? Nobody was calling for a nonpolitical workplace when the issues at hand were sexual harassment and equal pay for equal work. If there were some hiding behind that, they certainly didn't have a critical mass of support behind them. The problem isn't so much that people bring their ethics to work as it is that busybodies bring their moral crusades to work and demand that everybody join their cause or be labelled a bad, bad person. I, for example, have taken my ethics everywhere I have gone every day of my life. I have a rebellious spirit. I think rules in jobs like banning tattoos are stupid (even though I have none visible). I think dick in a suit dress codes are hazing and counterproductive. What I have not done however is send out an email chain to everyone in my office demanding that my CEO be fired for not doing a press conference on the plight of the furry fluidgender otherkin in Tanzania.
  • kaitai 5y ago
    That's a really wishful-thinking reading of history. Back when women were coming into the workplace, no, a non-political workplace was not the thing called for -- a male workplace was what was called for. If you need a movie, watch North Country (based on the nonfiction book Class Action). Then, as now, is that people show up to work in the bodies they have and they get shit for it. People get agitated because there are problems in the world they want to fix. Just 'cause they're not problems for you doesn't mean they're not problems. It's easy to pretend its all about fluidgender otherkin when it's not your problem.
    • betwixthewires 5y ago
      It is my problem. That's arrogant of you to assume that I don't care about people and injustice. But the fact is, we are talking about absurdity in the workplace right now. We aren't talking about equal pay for black people or women. We aren't talking about equal consideration of homosexual people for jobs. When we talk of it hypothetically that's how it is framed so as to paint everyone tired of it as an evil bigot, but when it occurs in the workplace, it's a CEO getting fired for wearing anime shirts to work, it's a petition to require Google to issue a formal statement on the Israel Palestine conflict. The people that don't want politics in every waking moment of their lives, it's not that they just don't want to see their boss get fired for throwing a black guy's resume in the trash. It's that they're sick of every person's pet crusade being blasted into their lives and having to nod in eager agreement lest they be destroyed for not being one of the Good Guys™.
• fighterpilot 5y ago
  "The office is exactly where we should be advocating for things" Not if those things are mostly orthogonal to the mission and capabilities of the company. We exist in a division of labor economy for a reason. Company A does X and company B does Y because those two companies have skills and missions that are unique to the people and institutional memory inside those companies. A is highly optimized for X, and B for Y. The people in A might even disdain Y (e.g. a charity volunteer's opinion about hedge funds) and the people in B might disdain X (e.g an oil and gas worker's opinion about environmental activism). That's all fine because those two companies are narrowly focused on their verticals of interest. This woke at work stuff demolishes that. People on company A and B didn't sign up for things orthogonal to X and Y, and many of them do not want to be socially pressured to go along with some activist agenda hoisted onto the company by a noisy minority of employees.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  People confuse politics with morals, as they say ‘Politics is preference’.
• StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  >Ignoring social problems in the workplace because it is a workplace is how we avoid solving those problems as a society. Those who create social problems in the workplace by constantly prosecuting their cultural crusade perform an astounding display of entitlement. Nobody is obligated to agree with your social judgements, no matter how fervently you hold your beliefs or how self-righteous you are. This is especially true when a large part of your cultural crusade consists of sifting through utterances from the distance past in an attempt to find anything you and your fellow crusaders consider "problematic", so that you may punish the transgressors. As an older person, my personal belief is society went off the rails in the late 1980s. Its when we started giving every kid a trophy, no matter how poorly they performed. Its when we started telling every kid they were entitled to respect, no matter how boorishly or stupidly they acted. Its when we started telling every kid that they were entitled to be free of judgement, no matter how awful their behavior or how much they deserved to be judged. Its when we started telling kids that their opinions were valuable, no matter how absurd, idiotic or delusional those opinions were. Now we have generations of people who think they have the right to force others to (fervently!) adopt their cultural mores. They are blinded by self-righteousness, having been raised on a steady diet of coddling and compliments. They have been conditioned since birth to reflexively appeal to authority whenever they feel wronged or "micro-aggressed".