“leave your politics at home” must remain explicitly disjoint from “workers have a right to self organization”.
if it doesn’t, then workers don’t have a right to self organization , and that, uh, doesn’t end well.
if it doesn’t, then workers don’t have a right to self organization , and that, uh, doesn’t end well.
i don't like that.
We should all be free to form our own opinions, whatever they may be, and not fear retribution from anyone.
“Accept large sums of money for building your boss’ vision for tomorrow while complaining about it” has a lot going for it, but I have a hard time actually sympathizing for folks that think they’ve a right to that.
People feel confident because they have many like minded colleagues. What happens when the winds change? Are people going to be happy when the workers of Exxon decide that it’s in their best interest to extract from some wildlife refuge? It’s not a good idea. We have laws that should govern corporations and businesses . It should not be a referendum for everything.
> Are people going to be happy when the workers of Exxon decide that it’s in their best interest to extract from some wildlife refuge?
No, but that's because they're not happy when the managers of Exxon decide that either?
Really the underlying problem is that giant companies and especially media companies like Google have a very large amount of political power. Almost more than the big parties, and certainly more than the average grassroots organisation. How google uses that power matters.
If Google want to be apolitical, the very first step should be to end all their corporate political donations and PACs. A good second step would be to end all recommendations (ie free promotion) for political videos on youtube.
But when you have to make a difficult decision (whether to ban a popular Youtuber for hate speech), make that decision based on precedent, the good of the company, and for the users. Don't view it as a personal attack to your political beliefs, and default to banning when the free speech happens to clash with your beliefs, while defaulting to complaining when people talking about LGBT+ rights get demonitized.
Also, if you are allowed to take your politics to work, accept that others may bring their opposing politics to work too. The vocal conservative-right Googlers are in the minority, and are mistreated as such by the political power brokers. A union should be for all the workers.
For example you can advocate for unions but you don’t have to conflate that with your personal politics.
If the entire union pitch is "the bosses are greedy fat cats, let's get them!", I do think that's toxic. There are good reasons why companies can't ban even toxic kinds of union organizing, but I would be very unhappy if I had to hear that all the time.
I find myself wondering (from the aggregate of posts in this topic) how many people actually have union experience. Unions are highly political creatures. In my state, at least one of the unions requires during election seasons that their membership take time out of their personal lives (time the union knows they have because they've held hours and overtime standards for over a century) to work the phones to stump for political candidates the union supports.
I may simply want better working conditions with no strings attached.
When you see a union taking stances on random unrelated political issues, that's not solidarity. That's union leaders exploiting solidarity for their own political benefit.