With the launch of the U.K.s first HR support consultancy specifically dedicated to removing political activism from small to medium employers, there is a slow realisation in the employment world that the politicisation of the workplace may not have been such a good idea after all. U.K. Government studies and independent research by the Free Speech Union has highlighted the negative impact on employees and employers and on the U.K. economy through the deployment of poorly designed and implemented Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) training.
Last month, Google’s leadership finally lost patience with activist employees as it fired over 50 individuals for breaching a tranche of internal policies.
To cut a long story short, 28 activists occupied Google’s executive floors and the offices of individual executives and refused to move. Their ‘sit in’ was to demand that Google scrap its business with the State of Israel. “Google, Google, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!” was the call this time. It was all caught on camera and you can easily find examples of this. The response was immediate and decisive: arrest and sacking.
Now to those paying attention, this was entirely predictable. For some time now the worm has been turning in the workplace as employers and businesses realise that their previous policy of indulging in politics has backfired. Years of permitting and encouraging political activism in the workplace has resulted in an increasingly vocal, radical and demanding cadre of employees disrupting core business functions, intimidating other workers and creating adverse publicity for the business.
The irony of 20-somethings, most of whom attended top universities, on Silicon Valley six figure starting salaries accusing every man and his dog of being privileged is beginning to dawn on their employers as ‘not a good look’ with customers, many of whom are genuinely struggling to make ends meet and have little or no patience with this hyper-privileged conduct.
The open politicisation of the workplace has been creeping in over the last 20 years. The politics around the climate debate was the earliest sign of this as the carbon market emerged and companies fell over themselves to sign up to green policies. What made this different from previous corporate initiatives was that HR used the mechanisms designed to improve employee workplace performance to encourage employees to drive green initiatives. Employees who took active roles in local green issues were lauded internally, for the first time rewarding employees for activities not directly related to sales, production or other income-producing activity.
This opened the gate for every political activist movement to rapidly spread their ideologies through the workplace. So we have seen MeToo, Covid mandates, BLM, gender self-ID and so on, all pushed through HR departments under the guise of ‘social responsibility’. Around 2010 we started to see a new role being pushed, that of the ‘ally’. No longer enough to tacitly accept that your employer sponsored Pride events etc., employees were encouraged and then trained to become allies – activists directly endorsing and promoting the ideology of the day. It was entirely predictable to anyone with the most rudimentary critical thinking skills that this would end in conflict and persecution of employees who for whatever reason disagreed with the ideology, and get employers into a phenomenal mess where they end up breaching anti-discrimination laws.
Yet, board directors, especially in the USA, decided to openly pick a side in elections and announce that they would not only donate but effectively put their businesses at the disposal of their preferred party. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a catalyst, with the leak of the 2016 video of Google’s top brass reassuring upset employees after the Trump victory being used by Republicans to demonstrate bias in social media. The new partisan policies as well as the almost universal anti-Trump stance of the mainstream media put the tech and media industries at direct odds with many of their customers. This is simply not a sustainable position. As Disney and other activist boards are finding out, eventually investors want a return on their money and their patience with companies that take highly politicised positions which inflame their customers is running out.
Unusually for Silicon Valley, there was one CEO who stood up against this. An article in the Free Press looks back to when Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong issued a statement through his blog in September 2020, shortly after the George Floyd protests. At a time when literally almost every employer of size across the West was releasing statements in support of BLM, Armstrong realised that this would set a precedent that would come back to hurt companies. His statement is worth reading in the original.
In essence the core of the statement is that at Coinbase they don’t:
- Debate causes or political candidates internally that are unrelated to work
- Expect the company to represent our personal beliefs externally
- Assume negative intent, or not have each other’s back
- Take on activism outside the core mission of our work
Brian realised that whilst well intentioned, adopting political positions on various social issues has “the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction and by creating internal division”.
Of course, back in 2020 the reaction was again predictable. Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said:
Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution.
Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey stated that by not “acknowledging” the “related societal issues” faced by Coinbase’s customers, the company and its leader were “leading people behind”. (Incidentally, the Free Press reached out to Costolo for a comment on its article but he couldn’t be reached.)
Tech entrepreneur Aaron White tweeted that the statement was “isolationist fantasy” and that Armstrong’s apolitical stance was “effectively guaranteeing” that the CEO would land on the wrong side of history on “absolutely every issue”.
To an actual historian, White and the other tech companies’ statements are indicative of the precocity of the tech leaders of the time. These individuals had become very powerful very quickly and were well educated in one way but dismally educated in others. Dorsey’s interview with Joe Rogan is an interesting example of this. It only appears to dawn on Dorsey after censoring content on Twitter that society needs freedom of speech to function. It’s a shame he had missed his history classes. Dorsey seemed at the time to think that this was groundbreaking stuff, that such a philosophical conclusion hadn’t been done and dusted 200 years ago.
As we learned, once again, from China’s Cultural Revolution, the politicisation of everything, the division of society into ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’, into the assumed ‘powerful’ and the ‘vulnerable’, has devastating outcomes, be they the mass persecutions of innocents in their millions, manmade famine as a consequence of societal mania, or debilitating internal conflicts that have undermined Google and other companies in their core missions.
Armstrong has been proven right. The idea that everything can be reduced to political struggle is incredibly damaging on human relationships; in environments that absolutely rely on functional collaboration between humans to meet a mutual goal it is devastating.
Now it is one thing for a company like Google to realise its errors; its survival isn’t at stake, it can roll with the punches. But we have seen big blue chips like Anheuser Busch pay the price at the tills for its decision to use its top selling beer Bud Lite, as a vehicle for pushing gender self-ID politics. The problem for smaller companies can be devastating.
It’s leading to a workplace environment where in several small businesses I have spoken to they no longer hire anyone under 35 because they have been burned by the expectation of some young employees that work is an opportunity for activism and their personal political beliefs take precedence over those of others. One business I spoke to recently told me that they were about to have to fight an employment tribunal because they refused to give an employee a month off to organise her local Pride parade last year. This is desperately unfair to young people who do want to just get on with their lives, but it is an increasing problem in the workplace.
An Employment Tribunal is an existential issue for small businesses. Yes, insurers may pick up the tab, but the stress, damage to the day job due to the time involved and the personal allegations that a business owner is somehow morally lacking are deeply disrupting and hurtful to those who find themselves in this situation.
The politicisation of the British workplace has been almost as rapid as that of the American. Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) policies are driven through corporate procurement – want to sell toothpaste to a chemist chain? Well you’d better have an ESG policy and the Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity policies that underpin it. Whilst it appears that most corporate HR departments are fully invested in this and certainly the CIPD – the institution that trains and qualifies HR professionals – is almost completely on board with the politicisation of the workplace, there are signs of a thaw. Last month I spoke with a very senior independent HR specialist who told me that five years ago her clients were HR Directors, but now her clients are CEOs and the request is usually along the lines of: “We’re losing the staff, we are losing engagement, we are losing Employment Tribunals, I need you to find out what the hell is going wrong with our HR department and to fix it.” And of course, what is going wrong is that HR has relegated its role of supporting the business in its core activities behind that of being a vehicle for social justice. It is immensely significant that this is dawning on investors and business leaders.
However, as we have already discussed, the consequences for small businesses are potentially existential, driving division, undermining workplace relationships and trust between colleagues. This is why Fair Job U.K. has been launched, an initiative that gives smaller businesses and employers the ability to tap into HR support that returns the employer to a stable workplace by removing political activism from the workplace and realigning the employer’s obligations to Employment Law and the Equality Act. The premise of Fair Job U.K. is almost entirely that stated by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong in 2020: the politicisation of every aspect of life must stop and the politicisation of the workplace is a zero sum game which will produce a result directly opposite to the ideas of diversity and inclusion by creating an orthodoxy and excluding those who disagree with it. Fair Job U.K. helps employers navigate this and protects small businesses and employers from politically motivated attacks on the company and staff.
In light of Google’s actions, the Free Press article goes on to describe the sigh of relief across Silicon Valley that this action draws the line in the sand. Sundar Pichai, Google CEO wrote in a note to staff:
This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics. This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted.
Brian Armstrong has gone from pariah to prophet, he has been vindicated.
The U.K.’s businesses must follow suit and remove political activism from the workplace.
C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack. He is a founder of Fair Job, an accreditation and support service for small businesses to help them navigate the minefields of EDI and HR.
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Sort of off topic, but I looked into FairJob (am trying to persuade my boss to sign up). It’s a fine initiative from what I can see. One thing that did make me think was this part of the Colleague Code of Conduct – Fair Job UK
On the face of it, it’s a statement one could agree with. My slight worry is that the “woke left” don’t see pushing their pet issues as “political debate” – they see it as the truth, the obvious truth, the science, the facts, what any right-thinking person would think. They think that their pet issues are beyond politics and that their opinions are uncontroversial. So they may well just plough on regardless with their views, and when you push back they will say “ah, you horrid far right person, you’re bringing politics into the workplace”.
Anyway, well done C J Strachan and it will be interesting to hear in the coming period how this initiative develops. I have a dream that one day they will be able to publish a long list of employers who have signed the pledge and those of us who suffer from “far right” opinions can use it as a resource when looking for employment.
Thanks for your feedback,
We’ve been working through what was called the ‘Pledge’ and the “Code’ and have made some changes – firstly we have replaced ‘pledge’ with ‘principle’ and also removed the idea of ‘committing’. Although the project is apolitical – merely being that results in ‘far right’ smears .. it’s the old ‘if you aren’t an ally you’re an enemy/silence is violence’ lie.
We understand that employers are naturally nervous about this so have set it up to be less formal, employers can either choose to openly state that they follow the principles or otherwise.
Point taken about the ‘political’ mention in that- we are changing it to ‘activism’ /
Brian Armstrong’s statement was pretty succinct.
If your boss wants any more info just get in touch we have a 15% off sale and have recently altered our membership levels to be simpler.
best
CJ
Thanks; much appreciated and all the best. I didn’t used to post anonymously here but I do now since our founder starting pushing BLM, though we did push back on that with some success.
We cover this in our latest FAT PIG NEWS! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNlpkuphHiY
Off-T
Well, have I just had a fabulous chat with a neighbour I have never met although she lives round the corner about 100 yards away.
I was just posting a sticker on a lamp post warning of potentially looming farming issues when a voice behind me declared “I agree with you.”
I was a bit startled and turned round to face a lovely young woman and the conversation started. We must have spent 40 minutes discussing the current state of play. It was bloody marvellous. Every single topic we were on the same page. Bloody wonderful. She assured me that there are quite a lot of people locally who have awoken and she said even the die-hard jabbers have said “no more.”
Honestly it was like finding a long lost friend. We could have chatted for hours.
I feel properly perked up.
It is wonderful when that happens. A little bit like taking a girl home for the first time and finding that glow when you do nothing but talk and laugh.
In a similar vein, I know someone – a director of a SME – who refuses to interview any candidate whose CV has a “preferred pronoun”. Too much hassle.
Common sense. It is a very underrated quality these days. Sadly.
Splendid. But if anyone found out who he was he would be up before a tribunal for discrimination before you could say pronoun. When I shortlisted people for junior doctor posts I had a whole series of exclusions. After all, when you have over 200 applicants you can’t interview them all or you would never get any work done. Was I discriminating? Yes. Did it really matter? No.
In the case of listed companies shareholder activism should have restrained the management and Board. There could even now be action against those who performed less well on account of misallocation of resources towards political objectives.
a true conservative or reformist government would call to account all Quangos and permanent secretaries. They should also demand accounting from NGOs international enter ties and charities which have received tax payer funds.
In the UK the Electoral Commission Commissioners should be required to explain Commissioners they did not apply the law against campaigners who were not registered campaign organisations. Most were not registered
Another terrific article. Many thanks C J.
Powerful stuff! And encouraging that the author is seeing signs that the tide is turning, slowly but surely. I hope so.
Politics also needs removing from sport. Taking the knee in homage to a lifelong druggie thief was disgraceful. All it did was make some people very, very rich as they embezzled the donations.
I see a couple of comments saying “the tide is turning”, well, didn’t go fully back to the horizon when nobody bought Budweiser? The advent of “Go Woke Go Broke” ensured it won’t come back in. The answer to all of this is simple: do not buy the products and refuse to take a job with companies that implement these policies.