Software company Basecamp has released a controversial new memo banning political discussions on company platforms, among other changes to its culture, adding to the pushback against increasing pressure from both employees and consumers for businesses to be more outspoken on issues like racism, climate change, and income inequality.
Basecamp’s leadership seems to be following in the footsteps of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who in 2020 declared his company apolitical (and invited any workers who didn’t agree with his decision to leave the company; about 5% of his staff took him up on the offer).
The Basecamp memo is generating ample debate, both within and outside of the tech community—and even in Quartz’s own ranks. In discussing the merits and pitfalls of Basecamp’s new policies, we suspected that our own relative positions of power were informing our interpretations of Basecamp’s motivations and the soundness of its new rules. So we took each rule, as stated in the memo, and offered both a manager’s view (from Quartz at Work editor Heather Landy) and a rank-and-file perspective (from Quartz at Work senior reporter Sarah Todd), in the hopes of facilitating even more productive conversations about balancing leadership and employee input in the workplace—even if it just got a bit harder to have those kinds of discussions at Basecamp.
Rule 1: No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account.
This is the rule that’s gotten the most attention so far. Basecamp co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are banning conversations about social issues and politics on Basecamp’s official workplace account. Their reasoning is that such conversations are a) too distracting from work, b) unconnected to work, and c) too stressful and conflict-laden. “You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target,” writes Fried. An addendum post from Hansson notes that Basecamp will still engage in conversations about political topics deemed core to their business, such as “antitrust, privacy, employee surveillance.”
The employee take: The founders of Basecamp assume that conversations about politics and society are unrelated to work. It’s a false assumption. Politics and societal issues shape the world of work in myriad ways, including both the products that Basecamp builds and the experiences that people have while working there. We know, for example, that people’s racial and gendered biases get built into algorithms; that programming terms can reflect racist histories; that conversations about transgender and LGBTQ rights can apply to something as concrete as company policy surrounding pronouns; and that the #MeToo movement prompted a much-needed conversation about how sexism and sexual harassment are rampant in many workplaces.
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Read More: Why Basecamp’s culture memo is so controversial — Quartz at Work