Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

I wonder if they're trying to pre-empt the issues Chef has been facing recently in selling to ICE.

Discussed in the article. The CEO was asked, specifically, about this.

Nearly every place I've worked at (in the US) over the last 20 years has had an explicit prohibition against discussing politics or religion in the workplace.

I'm not saying if it's OK or not as a philosophical matter, but it does help make the workplace more pleasant.

I am glad Dang changed the title as the original one was unnecessarily inflammatory.

I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that?

> Such a declaration could run afoul of legal boundaries in some circumstances. While workers have no constitutional speech protection in the context of their employment, federal labor law requires that employees be allowed to discuss the terms and conditions of their employment and possible unlawful conduct like harassment, discrimination, and safety violations.

This seems like a false dichotomy. There is a difference between being amoral and illegal.

The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them).

Being held to a political moral standard is tricky if you are not in the mainline political stance. That would make me quite uncomfortable. I go to work to support myself and my family. Don’t make that hard for me to do due to politics.

Depending on your field, it can be unavoidable. Look at the stuff Facebook is having to deal with now, deciding whether to reject specific advertisements from US presidential candidates. It's impossible to tackle that without ending up just having regular old political discussions in the workplace, if only to figure out what actions to take.

Thankfully most jobs won't touch this but if you're running internet services it'll probably come up.