To be clear, "keep politics out of the workplace" is another way of saying "I'm okay with the status quo, and if you don't like it I don't want to hear about it at work".
This sort of logic and villianization just adds to my reasons for not wanting that in my workplace.
Pretty much all of the “pro-politics at the workplace” types would demand that anybody who wore a MAGA hat be fired… so I think that the people who think politics in the workplace are OK are the ones who are actually the ones maintaining the actual status quo: you can have opinions, as long as they’re the same as mine.
This understandably makes some people uncomfortable. It challenges beliefs, it challenges self-worth, it challenges value systems, it challenges worldviews.
None of these invalidate the underlying concept that sheltering today's winners from any challenge, complaint, or criticism, is inherently repressive to those outside that class.
I'm on my side, first and last and always. If cooperation helps me, so be it. But if cooperation harms me, then I will speak up. If I am not heard, I will leave.
That is my inherent and sovereign right as a human being.
Oddly enough, I'm debating (on Mastodon) against the notion that a Single Global Authority defined as "suitably free", supported through taxes, would be a prefered / acceptable alternative to present private Internet service provisioning.
I agree with most of the sentiment, particularly public subsidy of comms capabilities. The concern is that it's not possibly to simply define a thing as "suitably free", you've got to work in a real world, in which definitions don't simply instantiate themselves, in which adversaries may take control of critical regulatory bodies (I pointed out that One Geopolitical Party with interests Significantly Opposed to Another has in recent history held the chair of the UN Human Rights Commission, where the UN was the proposed Internet provisioning entity).
Similarly: you can't simply declare by definition or fiat that we're all on the same team. For multiple parties' interests to be fairly represented and addressed, there must be some mechanism for representing and addressing those concerns.
Otherwise the proposal simply ignores existing realities and complexities and attempts to abstract them out of existence. They'll reappear in time in other places or forms.
Additionally, my understaning of "presume good faith" may be different from yours. It's not so much a belief I'll maintain, most especially in the absence of evidence. It's an operating and communications modality I will attempt to sustain (and hope others do), up to the point at which it is clearly no longer tenable. It's an extension of all feasible grace and credit, to the point that no possible justification for that extension remains.
Andreas Schou, a Googler, used to have an excellent guide to moderation pinned to his profile page there. A copy survives here:
https://www.voidstar.com/Takeout/ActivityLog/Comments.html
I've posted it, with paragraph breaks to Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/raw/W3vpntgM
You can challenge all you want, but being an annoyance in the office by forcing your views and interpretations on everyone is a major issue. I don't care about your politics and don't want to discuss mine. The company is paying you for productivity, not political change. Understanding boundaries is the first step to communicating with people.
The reality is that many people keep politics out of the workplace because they dislike the amount that bringing politics to the workplace can affect the cohesion of their team/department.
You're creating a strawman argument.
You clearly value the change that can be brought by bringing politics into the workplace. That's totally cool, your value system is different than that of some other people. All they're asking is that you take their viewpoint without assigning your assumed reasons to it.
The meaning may be absolutely as you describe. The effect, however, is to perpetuate gradients in power, privilege, and control.
It's the same argument as not wanting to find everything there is to know about your neighbor, a dose of ignorance is healthy to maintaining most relationships in life. You don't need nor is it healthy, to apply the same standard of knowledge to your coworkers as to your significant other.
1. People who politically disagree with the work the company is doing should just leave. They do not have the right to resist or organize against it.
2. Google should just go along with anything the government does. If there's an opportunity for profit, Google should pursue it. If employees disagree, they should vote. Otherwise, see #1.
3. Google should have some moral tests, but the current situation passes the test. It's not as bad as people are saying.
I honestly don't see how any of these are tenable. Number one is an argument against labor organizing in general, and the cats kind of out the bag there. Number two is just a variant of number one, and number three is inherently political—it's a situation where people see things differently, and the way we resolve those is politics.
There are plenty of other impolite subjects that are inappropriate to discuss at work too.
So there are certainly limits in the workplace and there is a line to toe for toleration and polite conversation, but saying "politics do not belong in the workplace" is pretty absurd.
On the other hand, many gay folks are afraid to even mention their partner at all at work, even casually in the what that most people do. In that case, the belief that "gay rights are political" that some folks have are creating a toxic environment.
Note that I said that someone who constantly argue against gay rights is toxic, I have met people like that (not specifically gay, but about immigrants for example) and being around them is not fun.
> On the other hand, many gay folks are afraid to even mention their partner at all at work, even casually in the what that most people do.
In that case it is no longer political and they can complain that people targeted them for being gay.
Not that that's good, necessarily. Just distinct.
The type of politics I want in the workplace is the politics of building worker power and fomenting radical labor unrest.
If you build tools for ICE to put children in cages, you're building tools to put children in cages.