this prompted me to further thinking today (cut from a separate comment draft):
The recent discussion about how programmers are bringing politics to work with them has suddenly made me wonder how I'll find recruitment if I am open about this business being a means to a cultural end. The trick with having any political component in your business is maintaining the absolute separation and distinction between the objective and everything else : the moment you allow political thought or anything else for that matter to permeate your work, you're neutered. And if you don't maintain a very clear fix on and evaluative feedback from your goals then you will fail as well. I surprised myself yesterday I am so stridently from a older generation and mentality to generalise where from my views on work politics must appear to have arisen - irrespective the plain sensibility and logic and educational experience agreeing with me - since I am intensely political and have spent 30 years working on possible means to balance the power of advertising and more importantly to return to sub multinational scale companies the ability to advertise which is effectively denied by the status quo. I mean how is Amazon not political in the act of providing unprecedented access to literature.. [0]
The UK legislation prohibits all conduct of political aims via any incorporated business.
I don't know why I can't immediately tell you if the USA is the same or not, but I'll be surprised if it isn't.
if you need any better reason why you shouldn't allow politics in your workplace, I should say that this is why.
[0] rather than improve my logic and rewrite this conspicuously inconsistent statement, I have realised I want to go and think about this further in some depth. I have added my own self reply comment deliberately to contradict any impression that I have given of being a political in my work and life. I have seen here that I need to better delineate the distinction in my mind that separates politics from my business in the way I have entirely accurately reported, because I should be inclusive of my personal political animus and purpose that I have furthered through commercial activities. Of course, providing access to literature as Amazon did on unprecedented scale, is political and obviously not party political. However, non partisan action can very often be taken to be partisan tactics by individuals and organisations in party political life. However this is where I see that we need to eliminate all connections to partisanship attached to actions of social benefit. This is a problem inherent to privilege and social class structure and economic inequality. We need to urgently learn collectively the true political meaning of the ranges of corporate action which are presumed as being socially beneficial and aligned with Democrat policy and society and identify where this is not true. I'm looking immediately at the effects of the gig economy and the increasing similarity to serfdom and indenture that is the combined function of low interest rates and impossible to escape debts from education that's become compulsory irrespective if you have no ambition in accordance with the traditional necessity for university education. low interest rates have almost certainly forced into debt children of parents who in my generation could have paid for education from interest on modest savings. the current requirements for millions in capital in retirement is a insufferable burden I struggle to comprehend not least because I must save for retirement over again due to medical bills and I have barely the years of expected life in which to do so. the most important consequence is my company is re-established on financial assumptions designed to provide a retirement income within 20 years and that's very much faster than any employer is capable of doing, who has come to my attention m
I think that the real politics that has begun to enter into American and European business life is a financial political anxiety which is manifesting itself to become vocal and visible in very many different ways other than talking about money because especially in America we don't like to talk about how much we earn and less and less so because of increasing inequality.
and because of this social taboo I think I am beginning to understand why the introduction of political ideas into the workplace has been so fraught and emotional
but I'm not even started in my search for a understanding of this problem - all I know is that I have to actually find a way of resolving this contention if I am going to be able to retire myself, because the only likely employment I can get due to my health is the ongoing revival of my company which inevitably is going to face these issues head to head sooner than later.