If Bob and Alice can't work together anymore because of a non-work related debate they had using company resources, that's a problem for HR.

It doesn't matter if its political or not. Politics and religion are just the two easiest ones to get into a debate about - and religion is a protected class.

Whats more, if either of them are fired and they claim a wrongful termination because of that debate (on company resources) it puts the company in a very awkward place of both previously encouraging that sort of discussion and discouraging it.

If you want to debate politics, go set up a non-work email list or slack channel.

The office isn't the third place ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place ) and discussions of politics belong there - in the third place.

Discussions of politics in the office with managers and people reporting to you and needing to get along and not being able to leave without forfeiting a paycheck - those are things that make the office a bad place for debates on politics - especially the debate of the CEO's political stances on things that extend belong the product the company produces.

> If Bob and Alice can't work together anymore because of a non-work related debate they had using company resources, that's a problem for HR.

It doesn't appear that this is what happened in this case, however.

While not expressed in this article, in the followup to it from Basecamp: https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26967835 )

> I've read that reply many times now. I can't in my most critical reading find evidence or origin for the charges that this constituted protected-class discrimination or harassment. But obviously I'm not exactly an impartial party in the matter, so we followed our standard procedure regarding such complaints and sent it, along with all the context, to external labor lawyers for review. They concluded that no discrimination or harassment had occurred, and we shared their findings with the company.

> ...

> This was the second such discussion in a few months that had to be closed out following an acrimonious devolution that pitted employees against each other, and stressed these complicated power dynamics between managers and reports, all on a company-wide stage that invariably pulled everyone into the spectacle.

> Together with other acrimonious debates and inappropriate discussions with roots in societal politics on our internal communication systems, this formed the context that led to the recently announced changes. After going through repeated, worsening incidents like this, we took a hard look at why we kept doing this, and kept getting the same unproductive, unhealthy results.

Alice and Bob are having difficulty working together.

There are additional stresses of the power dynamics of having a manager involved in it.

HR and Legal have both been involved in this.

I think the wording you used was "non-work related" - it was very much related to something that happened at work.

> In fact, reviewing the original list in question, the vast majority of names on it fall into the category of the two specific examples above. It's not a list of, say, primarily Asian names. Out of the 78 names listed on the last version we were able to recover, just 6 names appear to be Asian.

> So connecting this to the shootings in Atlanta, because the Asian victims of that atrocity had their names misspelled in news reports, is exactly the kind of linkage I'd like us to avoid when we analyze our mistakes together at work. It needlessly creates this extremely high-stakes environment where inappropriately making fun of a name like [customer name of nordic heritage] can be rendered as part of some larger narrative of colonialism and racism that it just does not merit.

Discussing the shootings in Atlanta is not work related.

Trying to connect the misspelling of the names of the victims in Atlanta to the name list and "some larger narrative of colonialism and racism" is something that doesn't belong in work.

Which brings us to:

> This was the second such discussion in a few months that had to be closed out following an acrimonious devolution that pitted employees against each other, and stressed these complicated power dynamics between managers and reports, all on a company-wide stage that invariably pulled everyone into the spectacle.

Arguing about colonialism and racism on company boards stemming from an act of violence that the company was not involved in in any way, shape, or form - that doesn't belong on company related discussion forms. Using the 'best name list' to try to make this linkage just makes things worse when HR is finally called in to say "cool it." It is not work related.

When HR is called in to say "cool it" repeatedly in more and more acrimonious subjects, it is the place for the leadership to do something to change the tone of discussions at work and put limits on what work related politics is.

The name list was, but that comment calls out "repeated, worsening incidents".

If I was a manager trying to justify a disproportionate decision, I may very well say that there were other incidents - that will remain confidential - that also supported the same decision. Of course, like DHH says, there may have been other incidents. I am very keen to hear about those ones, too, since initially the response to the names list seemed disproportionate.

Of course they do?

The alternative often mentioned in this context is to have some kind of democratic system for setting a definition and then resolving disputes around it, but certainly you can see how we've already started down a path that has the potential to utterly consume an otherwise functioning organization.

I wouldn't begrudge a company for trying the above approach, but I personally wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole, and I'd appreciate it if they were as transparent as Basecamp has been.

> Of course they do?

I've never worked for an organization that has had a company definition of what is and isn't political speech.

The default in my experience seems to be companies that have a generic policy about what is acceptable to talk about in the workplace, which usually excludes the topics of politics and religion. Some articulate it better than others, but when push comes to shove it's up to the owners to decide what will happen in the end. And in that sense they absolutely get to define what the company handbook means when it says political speech.

Actually after having a quick lil Google about this, companies that mention "political activity" in their guidelines are in the minority (1/4) and Basecamp may actually be contravening the NRLB guidance on political speech - particularly since its pretty clear that the political speech in question was surrounding a matter at the workplace. So no, they don't "absolutely get to define what the company handbook means" - there are legal boundaries to what they can prohibit.

Additionally, we should be absolutely cynical about companies prohibiting political speech. As this Basecamp example shows, they'll attempt to do so about workplace matters.