The end of the 'Employee Activist'
Google's sacking of a group of employee activists is a stark contrast to their previous active involvement in activist issues. Is this the end of the 'Employee Activist'?
With the launch of the UKs 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. UK Government studies and independent research by the Free Speech Union has highlighted the negative impact on employees and employers and on the UK economy through the deployment of poorly designed and implemented Equality Diversity and Inclusion training.
Last month Google’s leadership finally lost patience with activist employees as it has 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 and response 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 indulging and encouraging political activism in the workplace has resulted an increasingly vocal, increasingly radical and increasingly demanding cadre of employees disrupting core business functions, intimidating other workers and creating adverse publicity for the business.
The irony of twenty 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 twenty 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 was rewarded.
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 etc 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, 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 announced 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, the leak of the 2016 video of Google’s Top Brass reassuring upset employees after the Trump victory was used by Republicans to demonstrate bias in social media. Such policies as well as the almost universal anti Trump stance of the mainstream media put the tech and media industries at direct odds with the majority 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, their patience with companies that produce and take highly politicised positions which inflame their customers is running out.
Unusually for Silicon Valley there was one CEO who stood up against this. This week an article in The Free Press details when Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong issued a statement through his blog in September 2020, just after the George Floyd incident. At a time when literally 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. As the article mentions, his statement is worth reading in the original.
In essence the core of the statement is that at Coinbase we 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.The Free Press article goes on to state: Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said:
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 their 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 company’s 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 the effect of 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 in to ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’ into the assumed ‘powerful’ and the ‘vulnerable’ has devastating outcomes, be they the mass persecutions of innocents in their millions, man made famine as a consequence of societal mania or, in the 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 and 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 their decision to use their top selling beer, Bud Lite, as a vehicle for pushing gender self ID politics. The problem for smaller companies and especially very small companies can be devastating.
It’s leading to a workplace environment where several small businesses I have spoken to 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 that 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 as rapid as that of the American. Environment Social Justice 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 their clients were HR Directors and that 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 FairJob UK has been launched www.fairjob.co.uk, 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 FairJob UK is almost entirely that of Brian Armstrong, 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. FairJob UK helps employers navigate this and protect 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 and this action draws the line in the sand, Sundar Pichai, Google CEO said 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,” Pichai said in the memo to staff. “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 UK’s businesses must follow suit and remove political activism from the workplace.