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Comment by gnopgnip | Hacker News Reader

Where do you draw the line on what participating in politics means exactly? Is wearing a mask during a pandemic politics? Is calling someone by their preferred pronoun, or recognizing same sex marriage politics?

In practice having "no stance" means supporting the status quo

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> having "no stance" means supporting the status quo

Voting "remain" in Brexit was supporting the status quo. Voting "leave" was opposing it. Having no stance on Brexit means having no stance on it.

We're allowed to not have opinions on everything.

> Is wearing a mask during a pandemic politics? Is calling someone by their preferred pronoun, or recognizing same sex marriage politics?

IMO, no, no and no.

Where it becomes politics is when you start trying to force others to follow your preferred behaviours in those areas, over and above what the law requires. If you want to do that then you should vote and/or campaign to get the law changed, via the usual routes, and normally outside the workplace (unless directly related).

Over a decade ago, google used to offer benefits to their employees including those who were in a relationship that wasn’t marriage. In otherworldly gay couples. The policy was neutral and straight couples could take advantage of it.

Well irs policy doesn’t allow tax free benefits in this fashion. So employees had to pay extra income tax that was “imputed” from these taxable benefits. And google paid the employees extra taxes.

Is this a political position? Would it make sense for google to cheer for sale sex marriage which reduces their own financial burden? Is it the right thing to do?

Or consider immigration... many high tech companies have substantial immigrant work forces. The thin wedge of the “Muslim ban” in 2017 was a threat to their businesses.

So it makes total sense that a company would engage in politics. Since some of the hot button political issues today boil down to “who is human and who gets full rights?”, yeah that’s a fight that one cannot turn a back to, and many companies cannot.

I wouldn't consider paying extra taxes on behalf of employees political, no. Lobbying re immigration is a fair point though; I'd been considering this discussion in the context of companies pushing a political view onto their employees (per TFA) and lobbying is unrelated to that.

I'm not sure what issues you're referring to in your last para; I don't see any disputes over who's human. (I'm not in the US and am trying not to follow its politics too closely, in case it's contagious.)

It's referring to abortion arguments.

Ah, OK, slightly confusing choice of word then. As I see it the crucial question re abortion is when a clump of cells becomes a person; I don't think there's ever a stage where it's not (biologically) human.

People seem to use the noun (a human) fairly interchangeably with "a person".

Language and law both become very strange when we have non-person humans and non-human persons.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/animal-news/orangutan-granted-l...

in your example "Is wearing a mask during a pandemic politics?" -- What is the status quo?

same with the other two?

In the US it would be location specific

so, if a company had offices in NYC and Dallas (just making up an example) -- where the default reaction to masks are the opposite, is'nt the company not taking any stance at all the best option?

What the best option is depends on your perspective, and your goals. Focusing just on the short term bottom line, or being more progressive than the norm for the area, or more conservative could all have different effects.

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