His original post , titled I can’t sleep, is some brilliant writing. When we talk about the chilling effect that criticism of Israel creates in industries everywhere (including ours) this is what that looks like.
He attacked their investors by name and said they support a genocide. Either they back him and everyone looses their job or they fire him
It isn’t a shock. Right or wrong, if you call out your boss/board/investors, you should expect to be fired. Corporations are required to protect their shareholders, not make a moral stand. I hope the gentleman here understood that – when you choose to take a moral stand, it isn’t going to be without consequences. It’s one of the reasons we generally admire people who took a stand (and ended up judged “correct” by history).
Corporations are required to protect their shareholders,
Corporations definitely are not required to protect their shareholders, especially when those shareholders are championing genocide.
Anyway, this is yet another reason why for-profit companies should be illegal. The goal of an organization should be to help the world, not make as much money as possible.
“Within the limits of their discretion, directors must make stockholder welfare their sole end,” Strine wrote. “Other interests may be taken into consideration only as a means of promoting stockholder welfare.” – Chief Justice Strine, Delaware’s Supreme Court, 1985’s Revlon v. MacAndrews
First, this is just a US thing. But in the US it also used to be illegal to help slaves run away. Just because some judge says you have to do something doesn’t mean you should do it.
You’re conflating my statement of “this is how you should expect companies to act” with “this is morally right” – which was literally the point of my original post. You’re either deliberately trolling or unable to engage in a respectful conversation. Have a day!
Edit: Oh and CircleCI is a US company, so you once again tried to change the topic to fit your point. Please learn to converse in good faith. Cheers!
There’s no counterpoint in that article. The article says that things should change. At no point did I say I agree with the status quo.
The word you used is “required” I’m pointing out that’s false. The only person who can require you to do something is you.
You don’t seem to understand what is required of whom. Corporations are required to act in the best interests of their shareholders (within the bounds of the law) or the shareholders can sue the company.
People are not legally required to do anything but they will be fired if they don’t. If someone says something that makes a company look bad to their customers, they kinda need to be fired. Otherwise keeping them on may be detrimental to the interests of the investors.
Basically, you can say what you want but anything but positive attention may get you fired.
Exactly. The idea of profit/power/status/class being tied to profit margins on goods and services instead of contributions to better all of our lives cumulatively does not make any sense at all & is clearly extremely unsustainable. What it does do is generate power for the few at a much higher (“inefficient”) cost to all other stakeholders (humans & the rest of nature).
AH. Well then… that makes a bit more sense lol
“Loses.”
No Investor, even a billionaire, is going to fire everybody.
They just pull their funding, and everyone looses their job. No firing needed.
Or, they back him and acknowledge that they supported genocide but have since realised how wrong they were?
Or, they back him and acknowledge that they supported genocide but have since realised how wrong they were?
And then they all lose their jobs when the investor(s) pulls out. Did you not read the comment you were replying to?
If it’s a choice between one person losing their job and everyone losing their jobs, you are either rationally pragmatic to just one person or you are ideologically scorched-earth to everyone else.
I mean, if you are someone in a manglement position who has to pull that particular trigger you could also resign in protest, but at least that only torpedos your own career, and not the jobs of dozens of other people who work alongside you.
Actually I agree with Daniel. That’s exactly what they should do. I’m not justifying why the company chose to fire him; they made the evil choice and stand on the wrong side of history. I’m just explaining what happened.
Unless a company is an employee-owned socialist-style worker’s collective, employees generally have no say in that decision. A company can be every bit as evil as their owners want to be. Just look at Google or Facebook or Twitter.
And the problem in America is that for anyone making less than six figures (and many making below seven or even eight figures), their ability to protest any decision made by their employer is heavily constrained by a combination of the employer’s ability to fire them at a moment’s notice and the medical insurance that is tied to their job. Thanks to these two pincer-like forces, employee’s free choices in America are heavily constrained in the interests of capitalism and the Parasite Class.
And even if the “owners” want to be less evil, they themselves are often constrained by their investors, who force them to either toe the line or hurt all of their employees with unemployment and likely destitution and extreme hardship.
Because why bring needless suffering to those (the employees) who cannot do anything to avoid it, when they desperately need their jobs to survive in this capitalistic hellhole? Why punish the innocent employees who are just wanting to successfully put one financial foot in front of the other?
As any sort of CEO, your decisions should be for the financial well-being of your employees, first, which means knuckling under to the political demands of your current investor overlords. After all, if your decisions just put your entire workforce out of work because your investors pulled all of their money, your decision was a horrible one.
Granted, investors with odious ideologies should have been avoided from the start, but hindsight is always 20/20. Sometimes stuff like that isn’t just a known unknown, but even a complete unknown unknown.
And once you have an uncontrollably influential investor, your only choice might be to protect the economic welfare of your employees over an ideological stance that could easily make many of them homeless or even dead.
sometimes making a stand and doing the right thing means making sacrifices that you might never see the results of yourself. We are able to argue about this today because there have been people in the past who did that.
Ya, he’s an idiot who thought he was bigger than The mission and got shown he’s not. You’re not coming out ahead acting like that.
