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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

This is a false equivalence. It is apparently a matter of custom at WeWork for at least some employee meals to be paid for by the company. To dictate what employees may order in those situations is unconscionable.

Imagine your manager takes the team out for a working lunch, and you basically can’t order anything except for a garden salad from the menu. You have to be at the lunch, but you cannot order like a normal person. That’s wrong.

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Alright, you call false equivalence, I call petty fogging if you need your analogies to be perfect.

So to make it a proper example: what if your employer had a job benefit to reimburse gas & electric car expenses to visit clients, and then later decided to stop reimbursing gas.

Also, considering WeWork is taking this stance, if a WeWork boss takes you to a restaurant whose only vegetarian option is a garden salad, then she's totally trolling you.

edit: updating my analogy since i can't reply to your nested comment (not sure why)

Again, false equivalence. I’m not being forced to use either form of energy. However, as an employee at WeWork, there are situations where I would be forced to eat WeWork-sponsored meals, to which this policy applies.

Edit: Since my comment no longer makes sense because you completely changed yours long after I replied to it (not a cool thing to do), I think your electric/gas car analogy would be extremely problematic and would likely result in lawsuits. As you know, most cars are gas-based. If it is customary for WeWork to reimburse employees for work-related transportation expenses, and they then changed that policy to favor employees with electric cars, they'd be sued (and rightfully so). The rules are theirs to set - they can either pay for this category of expense or not - but they can't discriminate. I'd imagine that even this vegetarian policy will meet with a few lawsuit threats, but it's so ridiculous that I think they would quietly cave before any suit was actually filed. Imagine trying to justify the cost of defending such a suit to your investors. I'd love to sit in on that meeting.

Individuals requiring “medical or religious” allowances are being referred to the company’s policy team to discuss options.

In the rare occasions where you absolutely need meat it would be available...

I mentioned in my edit the reply button disappeared. I could have appended the edit instead of changing it inline. No ill will, just trying to refine my analogy as you kept insisting false equivalence (ultimately analogies aren't equivalent).

You can eat whatever you want, WeWork simply won't reimburse you if it is meat.

Once again to reiterate, they are not limiting your choice, they are limiting what they will reimburse.

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