>But to others, "politics at work" means "are we paying women and men the same for doing the same job?" and "are our recruiting practices leading to a non-diverse workforce and missing out on great people who should work here?" and "what problems does our company sole, and for whom?". These are really important questions. Why wouldn't you want to bring them up at work?
These are questions for people at work whose job description involves hiring, payroll, and the corporate charter. These aren't collective questions to be debated and answered by employees whose jobs are completely unrelated. If, for example, you are hired to be a programmer, then your job is to program - that's all. Its not up to you to decide what the company's mission should be, or, "whose problems we are trying to solve". While a programmer is debating these philosophical and political questions with other programmers, they aren't doing the job they were hired to do - program. Certainly if the ownership of a company decides that they want to hire people to not only program, but also opine on their political and moral beliefs, that is their right. But is also their right to decide they don't want to pay people they hire to opine and debate during work hours on issues that have no direct relevance to the job they were hired to do. Just as it is your right to refuse to accept a job at a company that hires you to exclusively do a job without bringing your political baggage into the workplace.
"Are we hiring diverse people I want to work with" is a question relevant to everyone, because it falls under workplace conditions, which is something you're not allowed to prevent employees from discussing.
Also, we're talking about tech workers who get stock compensation, right? They literally own (part of) the company.
If you don't like the people in a company, don't take a job there. Astounding to me that it is controversial that people who are hired to do a job should be spending their time doing the job they are paid to do instead of debating with other employees about what their employers should be doing. I don't see anyone suggesting that employees can't contact HR, or write letters to those whose actual job it is to making hiring decisions, or have discussions with the coworkers on their own time. If you are a shareholder, and you want to have input on how the company is run, there are numerous avenues to do so. The sense of entitlement is crazy.
This is true but I felt like this subthread was generalizing back to the rest of the industry. It looks like they're doing profit sharing as an alternative, which does make you feel responsible for the company doing well, but doesn't give you power to affect it in the same way.
But you are making a separate contention now: that employees are spent considerable company time on discussions of politics. If they were, up till now it was with the endorsement of their managers.
The Basecamp policy is now
that you can't discuss politics (or anything controversial) on any company platform, including e.g. in the break room, on the discord chat or whatever on your commute, out of office hours, etc. And they are officially removing any feedback mechanisms from company structures, figuratively salting the earth to prevent anyone discussing anything.
Obviously everyone could move to a platform in the cloud for discussions, but the writing is on the wall.
While this may well be a gross violation of labour laws, US employee rights are so weak it doesn't matter: say anything and you're canned.
Just as you ask for the right to be political on work premises and channels, they ask for the right to be apolitical on those same places. There are people on both sides of the fence. Which right is more important and how do we choose which one to disregard. There will always be disagreement between people and it should be practically impossible to create a society of perfect harmony. In order for both sides to at least tolerate each other's existence you need to create autonomous zones for each one. A company which doesn't want political involvement other than what is directly related to its business is exactly that. If you want to be politically active during working hours, then you don't fit into this company and there is no one stopping you from working for another one which is politically active or starting one yourself. People work better with people with the same core values. Only when both choices remain you actually have freedom and some semblance of tolerance. Remove either option and all you get is strife. Obviously some zones are "banned", like "I would like to kill people" and "I would like to rape people", because we all(or at least most ) agree this is not OK. However, I really hope all(or at least most) people have not gotten to the point where being apolitical is actually not OK and so is its zone.
These are questions for people at work whose job description involves hiring, payroll, and the corporate charter. These aren't collective questions to be debated and answered by employees whose jobs are completely unrelated. If, for example, you are hired to be a programmer, then your job is to program - that's all. Its not up to you to decide what the company's mission should be, or, "whose problems we are trying to solve". While a programmer is debating these philosophical and political questions with other programmers, they aren't doing the job they were hired to do - program. Certainly if the ownership of a company decides that they want to hire people to not only program, but also opine on their political and moral beliefs, that is their right. But is also their right to decide they don't want to pay people they hire to opine and debate during work hours on issues that have no direct relevance to the job they were hired to do. Just as it is your right to refuse to accept a job at a company that hires you to exclusively do a job without bringing your political baggage into the workplace.