Politics Moved Into the Workplace Because It Had Nowhere Else to Go

In the last decade a new kind of corporate crisis appeared. Employees of a company demand that it take a position on a political question, or that it drop a product, a client, or a piece of content on political grounds, and management has to decide whether the company is a business or a polity. Netflix had it over a comedy special. Coinbase had it over whether the company would engage with social causes at all, and answered by paying people to leave. Dozens of others have had quieter versions.

The usual commentary treats this as a story about generations, or about corporate culture, or about the particular politics involved. I think it is a story about representation, and specifically about its failure.

Where the Pressure Comes From

People want to be heard on the questions that matter to them. That is not new and it is not unreasonable. What is new is that the place where they are supposed to be heard, the political system at the national level, has stopped functioning as a place where being heard leads anywhere.

You can vote once every few years for one of two bundles assembled by someone else. You can write to a representative who receives thousands of such letters and answers none. You can march and watch the march be reported and forgotten. I have described elsewhere how the system forces every question to an altitude where nothing can be said about it. The result is a population with opinions and no outlet.

Pressure with no outlet finds one. The workplace is where people spend their days, where they know the decision-makers by name, and where a few hundred voices can actually change something by Friday. Of course the politics moved there. It went where the lever was.

Why It Is a Problem

I have sympathy for the employees and I still think the outcome is bad, for three separate reasons.

The wrong people are deciding. Who are the employees of a streaming company to determine what the rest of society may watch? They were hired to build software and negotiate licences. Nobody elected them and nobody outside the building can remove them. When a workforce of a few thousand imposes its view on a public of hundreds of millions, that is not democracy arriving at the company. It is a small group exercising power over a large one, which is the disease and not the cure. The question of what content is acceptable belongs to the democratic process. That process is broken, which is why the question ended up in an office, but a broken mechanism does not transfer its legitimacy to whoever picks up the pieces.

It damages the workplace. A company in which the staff are divided along national political lines, and in which management is expected to adjudicate between them, is a worse place to work and a less productive one. Rifts open between management and employees and between employees and each other, over questions that have nothing to do with the work. People who could cooperate on the product cannot, because they have been sorted into camps over something the product does not touch.

The rifts are worse than they need to be. This is the part specific to how the national system is built. Politics at the state level is a two-party, adversarial contest, and its habits travel. When a political question arrives at the office, it arrives already bundled: to hold one position on the content question is to be presumed to hold the whole package, and the disagreement is instantly total. If national politics were conducted issue by issue, with no bundles and no permanent sides, the same question at work would be a disagreement about one thing between colleagues who agree about most others. Instead it is a war between tribes that happen to share a lunchroom.

What Would Fix It

The corporate responses on offer are all attempts to manage the symptom. Ban political discussion at work, as Coinbase did, and you have told people that their one working outlet is closed too. Embrace it, and you have made the company a legislature it was never designed to be, with the wrong electorate.

The fix is upstream. Give people a place where their opinion on a public question is registered and counts, at the level where the question actually belongs. A system that decides issues directly does exactly that: the person who wants a say on what society finds acceptable gets one, as a citizen, alongside everyone else, and the outcome binds. The pressure has an outlet designed for it. The employee can go back to being an employee, not because he has been silenced but because he has been heard somewhere that matters.

Politics in the workplace is a symptom of a polity that does not work. Treating the symptom in the workplace, with codes of conduct and severance packages, leaves the cause untouched and guarantees the next case. Every company that has struggled with this is paying, in its own morale, for a failure that is not its own.