WeWork Will No Longer Let Employees Expense Any Kind of Meat

> WeWork isn't forcing employees to be vegetarian (it's not like a hiring requirement)

They're making a portion of wages/compensation contingent on eating vegetarian. If someone doesn't want to eat vegetarian when out on business, they have to pay for it themselves, where as a meal costing the exact same but lacking meat would be. I'd understand if it were a company based on vegetarian/vegan products, much like I'd understand a church choosing not to buy health care reimbursing birth control, but this doesn't appear to be that.

That said, I'm less concerned about meat at company events - the company can choose to cater whatever it wants - in much the same way I'd be fine with a friend hosting a party that didn't serve meat, but would consider it a pretty obnoxious faux pas to offer to buy dinner for me, but then ditch the check because I ordered a dish with chicken in it. Sure, I might stay friends with them, but it's a pretty good indicator of what kind of person they are.

> most companies have restrictions and rules surrounding their expensing

These tend to be pretty banal and don't really take a moral stance on whatever the employee's buying - "don't spend more than $x", "don't eat more than x times per day", "fly economy", etc. This would be more akin to "You cannot reimburse food containing Kale", "you cannot reimburse food bought at Olive Garden", "You must fly with Alaska on business trips", and so on. Maybe technically legal, but super obnoxious and arbitrary.

> Should we force WeWork leadership, despite their rights to hold moral positions, to pay for something they don't want to pay for?

Yes, I don't want my employer withholding compensation based on their own morals. See: companies refusing to pay for insurance covering birth control. Also consider hypotheticals where the otherwise secular employer doesn't pay for meals from non-halal/kosher restaurants, or which only stocks raw water in the company fridges, or which only allow employees to expense stays at hotels if they attend a sermon during work hours. Some of those might be illegal, some not (I'm honestly not sure on employment law for most of those) but all are just super obnoxious and disrespectful to their employees.

My employer has enough control over my life already. They definitely shouldn't also punish me financially for having different opinions than them.

To put a point on it: I don't think this particular case should necessarily rise to the level of "illegal", but I do consider it rude to the employees for taking away autonomy and implicitly disrespecting choices the employee makes. It's also overall pretty narcissistic of them to assume they both have the right opinions, and those opinions are so right that they should inflict them on their employees.

At the very least, I'm glad they're advertising this - now I know where not to work.

>Also, I am absolutely in favor of treating animals as humanely as possible... though I won't go so far as to not eat them.

So you're not in favor of treating animals as humanly as possible...

Your other post also applies to infants and the mentally disabled, can I eat them too?

I think you misunderstand the nature of argument. All arguments rest on a set of premises, and those premises themselves rest on premises, recursively so until we reach axioms which we simply accept to be true without further justification - like that the external world exists in some sense. Feel free to doubt that, by all means. Proof is not accessible to us - not a point the existentialists made (as you seem to believe), but rather something they took as self-evident and were responding to.

Analytic philosophy basically contends that if we assume axioms hold (correspond to the world in some sense) and we construct arguments from those premises which conform to logical rules, then the conclusions of those arguments are also true of the world in some sense. This is, of course, doubtable in various ways - but you pretty much have to abandon reason itself as the alternative.

I have family in other industries (auto, financial) and they look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them about the restrictions on per-diems and expense reports in Tech (no alcohol, exact receipts).

For whatever reason, its very common in tech to not trust your employees to be responsible.

> “New research indicates that avoiding meat is one of the biggest things an individual can do to reduce their personal environmental impact,” said McKelvey in the memo

I cannot imagine that scales - you cannot extrapolate from micro to macro here. No animals = no food for 7 billion people.[1] Definitely no vegetarian food without animals.

Do vegetarians not know how grains and legumes are grown? How fertilizer and soil amendments are made?

It would be incredibly destructive to the soil to use no animal products to grow 'vegetarian' food. Definitely impossible at scale, you'd just be strip mining the soil. On smaller scale farms the ideal is to give crop land a break by turning it into pasture for 1-2 years. A great way to "mulch" the crop leftovers (you don't eat the whole part of the corn plant, etc) is to use them as forage (cornstalk grazing).

Seems really odd to shun the "meat" aspect when we really are "using every part of the buffalo." And a big part of our animal use is making food for sanctimonious vegetarians.

[1] about half of the earth land surface is better suited to livestock farming than legumes/grains/other row crops. You know what grows well in cold, rocky New England soil? Pork, chicken, sheep, etc.