The issue isn't that workplace practices can be political, the issue is practicing political activism for your own pet cause in the workplace on company time and expecting literally no retribution. A lot of the pain points come from the fact that in practice it's turning out a lot of the politics in debate are only vaguely related to the specific company's actual activity.

> the issue is practicing political activism for your own pet cause in the workplace on company time and expecting literally no retribution

When the pet cause is something that affects working conditions at the company, then that "issue" you describe is simply expecting the company to follow labor laws.

Workers have the right to organize with other workers and advocate for change in their working conditions without retribution from the company.

> Workers have the right to organize with other workers and advocate for change in their working conditions without retribution from the company.

You're misrepresenting the facts. The newspiece states that the activists were fired for tracking and doxxing colleagues that they seemed reactionaries. This sort of abuse is hardly defensible.

    the issue is practicing political activism 
    for your own pet cause in the workplace on 
    company time 

I agree, but that's not remotely what was happening here.

Those examples are not really political, but they are illegal.

They were commonplace and accepted twenty years ago. They're illegal now because of politics and political activism.

Pretty sure they have been illegal for way longer than 20 years, for example the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) of 1978 and discriminating based on sexual orientation has been illegal since 1992, at least in California.

The big political fights we are seeing in USA are not local reality. It is like me being in Sweden saying that we aren't progressive enough since Poland has a lot of conservative views, and that therefore we need to add even more protections for women and minorities in Sweden until they are properly accepted in Poland. If someone told me that I have to be engaged in their rights in Poland or I am a misogynist and homophobic then I'd just sigh and ignore them.

> They're illegal now because of politics and political activism.

The point is that expecting the law to be upholded is hardly a political act. It's basic rule of law.

They are explicitly political. Not only that, they still happen, only became illegal due to political pressure, are not illegal everywhere, and are just two examples from many you can obviously think of.

The second example, employment discrimination against a gay person, is only illegal in the US in around 20 states. The other states do not include sexual orientation in their anti-discrimination laws, nor is it covered under Federal law.

They are illegal because the politics of the decades before us have decided they should be illegal.

The other essential part of not mentioning politics at work is that these private beliefs should not impact work conduct.

EG as per a sibling comment, if an HR Rep is not convinced regarding trans-rights, they should absolutely not let that impact their treatment of a trans person that comes to them.

Or, more famously, (and not that it did him any good) Brendan Eich made a political donation to candidates opposing gay marriage, but (afaik) there were never any reports of him mistreating any LGBTQ+ employees.

Nice examples. Can we use some that are probably 100x more common at Google?

Maybe you’re recruiting, and they let slip that they passed over a white male candidate because they're working on a new diversity initiative. Or maybe, after being trained constantly on gender bias and seeing vigorous workplace political debates on the subject, you investigate the issue and find no evidence to support anything other than the fact that men and women have different preferences, and you present this evidence to the debate and get fired.

Even acknowledging such cases seems to be political.

I don’t understand the point you are attempting to make. These are all political acts. The fact that you like some of them and dislike others doesn’t change that. Even the choice of sketching the “hard-done-by innocent researcher cruelly hounded out of his job” is a political act. This is the point - how do you isolate that from the workplace when it’s clearly so tied up in it?

He's/she's saying that acknowledging the effects of diversity hiring is political because it implies you don't like the concept if you're speaking against it.

You presented evidence for a negative?

I don't really believe that people should be expected to respect inane illogical arguments just because they have a political side to it.

In fact, doing knowledge work, being unable to form a coherent argument or inability to distinguish faulty logical arguing, would in fact make you a lot less qualified for it.

Citation needed? You're either intentionally or unintentionally spreading FUD.

I believe these actions are egregious enough that they do warrant taking some action, a conversation at minimum. That being said, in my own experience there is a near constant undercurrent of political sentiment that I simply avoid because there seems little point in engaging only to cement how much we disagree. It's more low-key stuff, like mild comments about something someone read on Twitter or a snippet of political news.

Sounds like a stretch. If something like that happens, you take it to HR, you don't don a mask and cape and begin rallying your coworkers to fight alongside you.