Changes at Basecamp
There&#x27;s a great blog entry I just read about this, &quot;On Politics At Work&quot;. I think the author effectively hits on a real problem with a lot of these discussions.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;json.blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;26&#x2F;on-politics-at.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;json.blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;26&#x2F;on-politics-at.html</a><p>To some folks, &quot;politics at work&quot; means &quot;endless battle royale political debates among coworkers in a Slack all day long; why wouldn&#x27;t you be against that?<p>But to others, &quot;politics at work&quot; means &quot;are we paying women and men the same for doing the same job?&quot; and &quot;are our recruiting practices leading to a non-diverse workforce and missing out on great people who should work here?&quot; and &quot;what problems does our company sole, and for whom?&quot;. These are <i>really important questions.</i> Why wouldn&#x27;t you want to bring them up at work?<p>I&#x27;m giving Basecamp the benefit of the doubt and assuming they&#x27;re trying to stave off the former. But it&#x27;s not that easy to do that without also affecting the latter, because if you ask questions that boil down to <i>is our company discriminating, even unintentionally</i> and <i>do our LGBT and minority employees feel as safe and valued as our straight cis white employees</i>, someone will be super upset that you&#x27;re &quot;bringing politics into the workplace.&quot; (I guarantee someone reading this is thinking &quot;ugh, &#x27;cis&#x27; is a slur, why you gotta be so political,&quot; and, bang: <i>somebody</i> has just made recognizing the existence of trans people into something inherently political, and now we get to argue over whether that somebody is me or the cis-is-a-slur guy.)<p>Here&#x27;s a thought: if your goal is to try to keep company Slack channels civil and focused on work, then don&#x27;t say &quot;don&#x27;t be political.&quot; Say &quot;keep company Slack channels civil and focused on work.&quot;