431–440 of 1001 posts
As a non-American, I find it truly bizarre (and sad) that's it's now controversial to publicly state that you're not taking sides.
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> We had internal meetings more or less instructing employees how to vote. Is that legal?
Yes, unfortunately. Most states don't have any law against employers politically pressuring their employees.
https://www.grubblawgroup.com/employee-rights-and-informatio...
The cool thing is that while Coinbase gets to use its inherent power/leverage over workers to get a certain outcome (capital is a form of power btw) workers can use their inherent power (withholding labor, negotiating as a unit, building consensus etc) to get their desired outcome and behavior from the company. No one owes anyone anything and there are not really any rules here. Consequences and outcomes yes but no r…
Now bringing these ideas to work and using that as a vehicle for change is not something I’m comfortable with, but if you as a company have a mission, you can’t expect your staff to not also have missions that might be aligned or orthogonal to the company.
It might make your company work better getting rid of politics (that disagrees with yours anyway) from the workplace by paying people. I wonder if it leads to a filtering out of potentially difficult conversations that people should have.
Anyway I’m against corporate stuff like this and I think you can cut this down quite a lot without the fluff. I wonder what the specific internal conversations were to prompt this public plea for apolitical-ness outside of the company’s political mission.
This won’t end well. The moment Coinbase articulates anything remotely related to an underlying set of values or business ethics, the accusations of politicization (and hypocrisy) will come flying. I believe that corporations are not governed or regulated to support activism writ large, but there has to be room for dissent (even if it ends in separation). How else do you arrive at a shared definition of “economic fre…
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> you can’t truly be apolitical; that's one of those "you're either with us or against us" type of deal - which is not the right way to deal with anything imho. You _can_ be apolitical - as in, you do not let your political views affect what you do. You keep your political views private. You do not try to change anyone else's political views as part of your job.
In January 2017, several of my coworkers were banned from reentering the country to go home to their families, while they were on business trips to visit other offices. How is anyone supposed to be apolitical in that context? How are the people who can't ever come home supposed to pretend everything is fine? A functional definition of privilege is that politics doesn't matter that much to you. No matter how it turns…
You're even more privileged if you're so confident in your job security and the popularity of your political views that you can spend your working hours advocating them without worrying that it'll affect your ability to feed your family.
The article mentions Coinbase and Amazon, and we've also seen possibly related HR concerns from Google, Facebook, and others. Is this going to become a thing for many companies? My current presence on a career site mentions my long-time involvement in societal implications of technology. In my case, the relevance to work is that I'm drawn to some companies and roles, knowingly avoid some others, and some of my techni…
https://www.icpas.org/information/copy-desk/insight/article/...
Encouraging explicitly amoral stances from companies and retaliatory actions such as this may be appealing to some but is ultimately harmful to the company and society in general. That's a debatable assertion of course but the more we learn about white collar crime and companies which disregard the harms they do the more we find that individuals lacking empathy are core players.
I've been around the block enough times to realise that any tech job inevitably has morally murky dimensions. It's never in regards the big overarching social issues like racial politics though. It's the advertising companies you work with, the casinos and bookmakers (which is the only time I've made a moral stand at work), or people losing jobs that are replaced by automation.
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> if I have a belief that my employment should make a positive change in societal issues, how could I work somewhere that I believe contributes to making things worse? Why the binary presentation, though? You can make the world better by doing a single thing well and respecting your customers (and their all-kinds-diversity) while doing it. Even if you're not directly contributing to BigIssue by doing it, the people w…
> Unless your work has serious atypical externalities, just doing what you're doing doesn't itself make things worse Most of the big tech companies are all encompassing enough that they all have serious externalities. - Amazon and Microsoft face protests that they enable ICE - FB faces protests that they enable Trump to promote hate speech - Google faced protests over a possible Pentagon contract > how can we explain…