You aren’t being paid to promote your political agenda, you are being paid to perform your function as an employee. If you don’t support your company’s agenda, why would you work there?
While we're focused on the purely "Political" agenda in this conversation, politics of a company include anything from how on-calls work to how sick days are counted.
You can work at a company and advocate for changing things and it can be as comparatively small as ensuring on-call rotations are fair to ensuring the company voices support for and takes actions in line with supporting Black Lives Matter. These are all political in the spirit described up thread as saying that politics is the figuring out and deciding of these issues as a group.
The decision of how many sick days, etc. is relevant to the business of the company. Social justice movements like “black lives matter” are not relevant to the mission of companies like Coinbase, as determined by their leadership.
> Social justice movements like “black lives matter” are not relevant to the mission of companies like Coinbase
That's the whole issue, and you're just affirming the consequent by saying this. Structural equality is unavoidably the concern of every person and group in a society.
Not having the time to concern yourself with politics isn't a position of neutrality or agnosticism. You can only adopt that position if the status quo of a society provides you sufficient protection, stability, prosperity, etc. to allow you to tune it out. If those conditions aren't true, it's not possible to "not concern yourself with politics" in a Maslow's hierarchy sense. And so doing so is unavoidably a tacit defense of the status quo.
Also false, many people who you would claim are affected by “structural inequality” and who are more focused with improving their individual conditions also do not have time to concern themselves with politics.
Example is myself. I am a child of poor immigrants. I am neither white nor wealthy. I do not care about involving myself in your politics, I spend my time focused on working and being productive for the sake of supporting my family. Frankly your politics destroyed my country.
You’re twisting words to make your point vacuously true. I do not care about changing federal government policy or who runs the federal government. Call that whatever you like, doesn’t mean I have ever received special benefits from the system any more than anyone else. That is my stance because I have better things to do with my time, like being productive.
The fact that you are able to not care about these things is a privilege you enjoy. And not caring about them is a political decision that you've made.
It’s literally a privilege everyone enjoys. No one is forced to care about politics at all. That’s a false premise. It’s always a choice, it’s not a privilege.
If you are a trans person and need to use the bathroom in a conservative state, then you are forced to care about politics. If you are a black person who is stopped by the police and rightfully fear for your life, then you are forced to care about politics.
that's not a political stance - that's negotiating your working conditions. It's private and individual, and only affect you (and your colleagues). It doesn't affect society at large whether you have on-call or how sick days are counted _at_ your place of employement.
But to use your position as an employee to push for universal sick leave, or for BLM, which affects society at large, not just yourself, is a political stance.
You take for granted current working conditions which were won via hard-fought political battles and which affect us to this day.
Also what about Maternity leave? Paternity leave? Are those not political?
How is negotiating working conditions not related to "how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society"? It's inherently (little p) political even if the engagement is at a company similar to how politics on your local HOA is still politics.
I think you’re conflating issues relevant to the business of the company, which might be considered political, and political issues which are irrelevant to the business of the company. The former is okay, the latter is not. The subject of OP is the latter.
In this case: basic and functional equality of the members of a society. Like pornography, this is hard to define precisely, but I know when the violations are egregious enough, and the functional equality of black Americans through in the eyes of the police right now is certainly egregious enough.
> ... that's negotiating your working conditions. It's private and individual, and only affect you (and your colleagues).
No. That's an "it depends" thing. If the "political issue" in question is something team or working condition related then it's not necessarily private and individual affecting only you.
Some people will care about that and want to potentially co-ordinate. Other people won't consider it important, and/or have other priorities.
> It's private and individual, and only affect you
You must be aware of the existence of unions. You're mentioning US-political concerns, so you're almost certainly familiar with the notion that the mere existence of unions is highly political. Whether or not you are a union member, union activities effect US workplaces.
Ignoring their existence in this discussion is itself a political position.
It’s very brave if you, in the middle of a pandemic, to say that “sick days are private and have no impact on society at large.”
You must have missed March and April when sick days at “essential work” (such as grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, and more) was in fact a matter of national conversation: sick people going to work spread disease. The number of sick days was also of debate: most low wage jobs don’t offer more than 1 sick day a month or two. Not so good when someone needs two weeks off.
This kind of short sightedness and inherent support of the status quo as “it’s fine, I see no problem here” is exactly what the other commenter(s) are talking about.
You honestly don't see how what you're describing is a fairly radical political opinion? You are now arguing that you should choose your means of survival as a political statement. If you don't lock-step agree with the politics of tech companies in general, you should find a lower salary someplace else that agrees more with your political beliefs.
I would love if people who are privacy advocates could get facebook salaries working for the EFF.
It looks like what you are advocating here is that not only should you silence non-status quo opinions, but your income should strongly correlated with your alignment with dominant political powers.
The premise of your argument is that you have no choice in your employment, which is false. There are hundreds of tech companies to work for, if not thousands.
No one is forcing climate change activists to work for oil companies. As a corollary it would be absurd for a climate change activist to argue that oil companies must employ them to allow their companies to be destroyed from the inside out.
I’m simply saying your employer does not pay you to advance any agenda other than their own and that using your employer’s time to advance a political agenda irrelevant to theirs is theft, for lack of a better term.
> choose your means of survival as a political statement...[or] find a lower salary someplace else that agrees more with your political beliefs.
or, compare how much you like a higher salary, vs a company that agrees with your political views. And choose appropriately.
What's not appropriate is to choose the company with the highest salary, but whose owner's political views differ from your own, and then try to change that to something more suitable to your own. Or use such a position as leverage to push your own political views to a wider audience than you could on your own.
A lot of people need to lie to themselves and others that they’re not complete sell outs who forfeited their morals for a high salary. Being loud at work and social media is one way of doing that. It ends up with no real traction in reality though because the companies they work for don’t prioritize it over profits.
> What's not appropriate is to choose the company with the highest salary, but whose owner's political views differ from your own, and then try to change that to something more suitable to your own. Or use such a position as leverage to push your own political views to a wider audience than you could on your own.
Very well put and I’m terrifyingly surprised at how many people are arguing for the opposite. That is literal subversion.
> What's not appropriate is to choose the company with the highest salary, but whose owner's political views differ from your own, and then try to change that to something more suitable to your own.
Why is that inappropriate exactly? If my boss’ opinion is “unions shouldn’t exist because I think I’m entitled to treat people however I want/play them off each other/depress wages” why am I not allowed to rebel against that and organize with my coworkers? In fact, the right to do this very thing is enshrined in law.
Did you read the Coinbase blog post? The conversation has really devolved away from the original topic. Coinbase issued a statement saying they are focused on their mission as a for-profit company. You're spinning it into something its not.
"I don’t think companies can succeed trying to do everything. Creating an open financial system for the world is already a hugely ambitious mission, and we could easily spend the next decade or two trying to move the needle on global economic freedom."
What exactly do you disagree with about their statement? What are you proposing that Coinbase do differently? Should they collectively vote to align the company with a political party?
If you think that politics is an overriding consideration at all times - that every hour you spend working for someone is an hour spent supporting their political agenda - I don't think you have any choice but to choose your means of survival as a political statement. I agree that this is a pretty bad outcome, which is why I'd encourage you not to embrace such totalizing views of politics.
I think what they’re suggesting is an employee who focuses more attention on work at work will outperform the employee who doesn’t. It doesn’t matter what the subject is.
> You just believe that 'politics' is outside the scope of the company. Other's believe that it is not.
I believe this is a strawman. The issue at hand is political issues that are explicitly irrelevant to the mission of the company.
Issues that are relevant to the company should be discussed and potentially acted upon, if that furthers the agenda of the company (and not just some irrelevant political agenda that you might be passionate about).
I have seen companies claim that the things that their customers do with their product is not their responsibility. They have claimed that they are right to ignore that issue because they believe it is "political".
Naming something as political can be used to shutdown conversation that can and should be happening in a company.
Let's get concrete with this:
Do you feel like a soft drink maker has an obligation to disengage with countries that have set up systemic discrimination and regularly violate human rights conventions?
It really doesn't seem within the mission of providing the world with sugary carbonated water.
It's hard to imagine cutting ties with a country due to disagreement with how they treat their population as non-political.
But wait you say: it's just a prudent business decision because the economics were against them and it was a "PR" win.
It doesn't matter. It's political.
This is an inherently political statement:
“Our decision to complete the process of disinvestment is a statement of our opposition to apartheid and of our support for the economic aspirations of black South Africans.” -Donald R. Keough
That was a decision that the leadership of that company made. I don’t see how that justifies employees bringing their irrelevant politics into an environment.
