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Comment by bendoernberg | Hacker News Reader

The entire black population of Montgomery Alabama gave up taking the bus for over a year during the boycott because they cared enough to make that sacrifice. People who care enough sometimes go on hunger strike, lie down in front of tanks, and risk arrest for what they believe in. If you need a "better offer" than what I assume is your current 6-figure salary to change jobs, then Uber's sexist, anti-worker, sociopathic ethos and the message their practices send to the world are apparently not all that important to you. There's nothing insensible about expecting incredibly mild amounts of empathy and moral courage from some of the most economically secure workers in the world.

If you're a janitor or food service worker at Uber, then I apologize for making incorrect assumptions and my thoughts for you would be different.

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It's pretty self-righteous to tell someone they should quit their job because of your beliefs when there is no cost to you and potentially quite a bit of cost to them.

I can't speak to whether it's self-righteous or not, but collective action is not possible if people can only ask others to do what they have also done. Everyone has different abilities and positions in society that enable them to take action in different ways. College students couldn't divest from South Africa during apartheid, but they pressured their colleges and other businesses to do so, and that feels perfectly reasonable to me.

Perhaps it's self-righteous to argue that nobody should help Palantir provide DHS with a Muslim registry under any circumstances, even if it means negative consequences for them and their family (and for most software engineers it really won't!). But that's what I believe, and I'd like to think it's the choice I would make in that situation, and I'd hope that my family and friends and strangers on the Internet would push me to acknowledge the moral choice I was facing and make the choice that helped others instead of maximizing my own narrow self-interest.

> but collective action is not possible if people can only ask others to do what they have also done.

Hmm, I think you don't believe in leadership? Even warlords in the ancient times know they have to risk losing their lives fighting when they recruit an army for themselves.

We Chinese call the people Keyboard Men who ask people to do all kinds of things, behind their keyboards.

I don't understand this sentiment. Whoever you're responding to could have other responsibilities, family or otherwise, where his or her decision to leave could adversely affect other people - not just them. I also don't quite think it's appropriate to invoke one of the seminal events of the Civil Rights movements in this country as a way to try to shame someone into quitting a job at a company you don't like, exogenous of all the nefarious claims made against them. Let's hold off on grabbing pitch forks for the time being.

You're right that leaving a job can affect other people...but so does staying! By continuing to work there, Uber employees are facilitating a sexist environment, the exploitation of the drivers who (if things go according to plan) will soon be discarded and left with car loans they can't pay back, and a general disregard for the wellbeing of anyone who is not an Uber shareholder or executive.

I agree with you that the Uber situation is far from the civil rights era, but I wanted to pick an example of regular people (almost certainly in a much worse situation than OP) making a sacrifice that impacted their finances and quality of life. Those people had family members depending them too; the difference is they had a cause they cared enough about to make sacrifices. I believe that people should either be willing to make sacrifices for things they care about, or admit that they don't care enough. OP was instead treating the suggestion that people make a sacrifice as a prima facie absurd suggestion, and I find that troubling.

Yeah right, because catching a bus is the same as staring down a tank. Literally the bravest thing I've ever heard.

How about next time you have a problem with the way a company does business, you just don't use that company's services? Or is that not enough for you? You have to march around HN and tell everyone else what they should be doing in order to appease you?

I think an honest reading of my comment would reveal that I was providing a range of actions that people can engage in that require some level of sacrifice in service of a collective goal. My point was that on this spectrum, switching six-figure software engineering jobs (for most people not in an emergency situation or supporting a family of 9 etc) is not very much to ask when it has the potential to shift the industry's attitude towards sexism and generally antisocial behavior by the companies that increasingly shape the lives of billions of people around the world. If someone is not willing to make a moderate sacrifice for that cause, then it seems reasonable to doubt they are really all that committed to it.

And you're correct, deleting my Uber account (as I've done) is not enough for me, because I am only one person and unless I work together with other people I do not have the resources necessary to cause Uber to change anything. It is only through collective action that an $xx,000,000,000 company can be forced to change anything, and that requires communication. I'm not telling other people what they should do to appease me, I'm asking other people to use their position of power to help those with less power, such as women who are software engineers and Uber drivers.

"collective goal"? What's that, and what collective do you represent here?

Your viewpoint assumes a lot about the original commenter's life situation. It would be incredibly foolish to leave a stable, well paying full-time job if one were supporting a family living in one of highest cost of living cities in the U.S. Especially if someone in their family has a chronic medical condition. I understand it can be done as you mention in your examples, but it's not so easy -- especially with uncertainty surrounding healthcare in the U.S. in general.

First off, you're absolutely right that I don't know the poster's specific situation, and I should have done a much better job addressing the general case and not the specific person whose circumstances I know nothing about. Can't argue with that.

The thing is, everyone in the world has ties to other people and responsibilities, and they have to decide how to weight these different factors. It seems very clear that Uber is systematically mistreating and exploiting the people in its path. Software engineers as a group are in the best position to convince the company to change course, or to punish it if it does not change course. They have far, far more leverage per person than individual drivers or Uber customers, and they also are risking relatively little; they can reliably expect to find another job that pays six figures in a manner of months, right? I believe that people with that level of economic bargaining power and security are morally obligated to use that power for the benefit of others.

If the original poster had said "I don't want to risk leaving my family hungry," that's one thing. Instead they said they couldn't be expected to make any sacrifice unless someone else went to the trouble of getting them a better offer. The idea that the poster has no moral obligation to take action for the good of others unless it will also benefit them is absurd and repugnant to me. If the poster wants to admit they are not bothered by the allegations against Uber or don't care very much, then I will appreciate the honesty, but software engineers (in general) are not in a good position to blame morally suspect positions on necessity or survival.

Not sure that's the best example, since the Montgomery Bus Boycott was carried out in direct coordination with a carpooling system, so the activists took significant care to provide the alternative for the like-minded to take.

http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/m-5146

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