On the menu today: It’s almost Labor Day weekend, so let’s close out the week by focusing on what people’s actual jobs are, because apparently some employees at Microsoft, Google, Tesla, and JP Morgan Chase have forgotten what it is their institutions do, and believe that those pesky little things like selling products should take a back seat to these employees’ true passion, progressive activism. Employees of corporate America, the bosses are sick and tired of your political crusading on the company’s time and company’s dime and are demonstrating that it’s time to get back to work. Plus, another rare guest arrives on the Three Martini Lunch podcast.
The Office Is for Work
It’s easily overlooked, but Microsoft fired a group of workers in the past week because they mistook their workplace for a college campus where they could hold protests, break-ins, and sit-ins:
Microsoft on Thursday fired two additional employees after firing two others a day prior, following a break-in at the office of its vice chair and company president, Brad Smith, earlier this week, as part of a protest of the technology company’s purported links to Israel.
“Two additional employees were terminated due to serious violations of established company policies and our code of conduct, including participating in recent on-site demonstrations that created significant safety concerns for our employees,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News.
The terminations came after a group of seven people broke into executive offices at Microsoft’s global headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on Tuesday to hold a sit-in.
Nine days ago, employees and former employees announced they were “taking over” part of the 500-acre headquarters campus in Redmond, Wash.:
Dozens of employees, as well as former members of the firm, congregated on Microsoft’s campus in Washington on Tuesday afternoon (August 19). The employees, who were also joined by locals, are part of the No Azure for Apartheid group — which itself is part of the No Tech for Apartheid movement.
The group took over part of the campus which spans around 500 acres in Redmond and recently underwent redevelopment. They set up tents and declared the area a “liberated zone”. The group said they had changed the name of the area from the East Campus Plaza to “The Martyred Palestinian Children’s Plaza.”
Hey, protesters, you guys know that if a place is called a “campus” it isn’t automatically part of a college or university, right?
Apparently, Microsoft desperately needs the Bob Consultants of IniTech from Office Space to go around and ask employees, “What is it that you would say you do here?” Because some Microsoft employees seem to think their job is to sort through all of the company’s contracts and make sure they’re not supporting the state of Israel. Now, I’m fairly certain that is not in their defined duties, otherwise they wouldn’t feel the need to break into the offices of top executives. If the top Microsoft executives selling Azure cloud computing services wanted the opinion of these employees, they would have asked for it.
The employee group, “No Azure for Apartheid” demands that Microsoft “ensure the safety of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and allied employees by protecting pro-Palestinian speech, actions, and fundraising initiatives on internal company platforms.”
Why?
Why is Microsoft obligated to protect, or even permit, “pro-Palestinian fundraising, actions or speech on internal company platforms”? Those company platforms are, presumably, for doing the work of the company. It’s bad enough when your co-worker’s daughter is selling Girl Scout cookies, and you feel obligated to imbibe a sudden infusion of sugary calories in the name of workplace comity.
Microsoft sells software, cloud computing, Xboxes, OneDrive, Outlook, and intrusive interactive anthropomorphic paper clips who think you’re writing a letter and could use some help. (Stop telling me what to do, Clippy! You’re not the boss of me!)
Microsoft wasn’t founded to promote the cause of the Palestinians, nor any of the terrorist groups that have adopted the Palestinian cause as an excuse for their appetite for violence, mayhem, and abuse.
Maybe the protesting employees are misinterpreting the soft-focus corporate do-gooder rhetoric on the company website: “Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” I’d note that under the section on “protecting fundamental rights,” Microsoft writes, “To protect people’s fundamental rights and mitigate potential harm as we extend the benefits of technology, we promote responsible business practices, expand accessibility and connectivity, help to protect democracy, and advance fair and inclusive societies.”
Does the Hamas-run Gaza Strip strike you as a fair and inclusive society? The Amnesty International report on the way Hamas runs Gaza sounds like a demon’s resume.
The Wall Street Journal notices a trend — one that I would argue is long overdue:
Alphabet’s Google last year called in police, then fired dozens of workers who engaged in a similar protest. Tesla ousted an employee after he created an anti-Elon Musk website and plastered his Cybertruck with protest slogans. Some companies are restricting even nonpolitical debate, as JPMorgan Chase did after an influx of employee comments complaining about the bank’s return-to-office mandate this year. The new, hard-line playbook that companies are adopting to confront employee activism reflects two developments: One is a political climate in which companies risk the ire of the White House — and some consumers — if they appear to cater to “woke” forces, including their own staff. The other is an ever-tougher job market in which white-collar workers — especially in tech — have lost considerable leverage.
The result is a more adversarial employer-employee dynamic in which bosses are far less concerned with accommodating their workers’ political and personal views. These days, many business leaders would just as soon trim head count as appease vocal staff. That has fired up some office activists even more.
In the pantheon of sentences I wish I had written, Josh Barro’s “your workplace is not Fleetwood Mac” ranks high up there. He wrote that in 2022 after a messy and public spat between workers at the Washington Post* was fought on social media, for the whole world to see:
Airing internal workplace disputes in public like this is not okay, even when you are right on the merits. My statement isn’t just obvious, it’s how almost all organizations work. If you think your coworker sucks, you don’t tweet about it. That’s unprofessional. If you disagree with management’s personnel decisions, you don’t decry them to the public. That’s insubordinate. Organizations full of people who are publicly at each other’s throats can’t be effective. Your workplace is not Fleetwood Mac.
Barro pointed out an uncomfortable truth for institutions on the left: “Organizations primarily staffed by conservatives have various problems, but they don’t have this one. And this phenomenon extends well outside the media, to liberal-staffed nonprofit and political organizations, where leaders are terrified of their employees’ potential outbursts and are therefore letting them run roughshod over strategic goals — and especially over prudent decision-making that might help win elections but do not meet every checkbox of the left-wing keyboard warriors who could cause so much trouble inside and outside the organization.”
Shockingly, having a staff full of impassioned, sensitive, outspoken young progressives makes them nearly impossible to manage because everyone’s consumed by internal grievances, hurt feelings, and bickering; as The Intercept reported in 2022, “The progressive advocacy space across the board, has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.”
As I wrote after the Post kerfuffle:
When you go to work for a company, you are signing on to accomplish a certain task and agreeing to prioritize that task. If it’s the Acme Widget Company, your job is to help make widgets. If it’s the Washington Post, it’s to help cover news. Your employer is not running a therapy session. Ensuring that you feel good about your coworkers is not the company’s priority or mission. It has an interest in ensuring there’s no harassment, abuse, or behavior that is genuinely harmful to employees and disruptive to the company’s objectives. But it is not interested in making sure you are friends with all your coworkers and every day is a virtual campfire gathering of holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.”
Sometimes, your coworker is going to say or do something that you think is stupid or offensive or irritating. When that happens, your job as an employee is to suck it up and focus on the task at hand or work it out yourselves, and if it becomes intolerable and irreconcilable, you’re free to move on to another employer. Almost every great achievement by a group — from Lincoln’s “team of rivals” to military special-forces units to innovative designers and engineers to championship sports teams — involves individuals on a team putting aside their differences, disagreements, and personality conflicts and focusing on the common goal. Teammates don’t need to love or even like one another, but they do need to respect one another.
You have to prioritize the mission over how you feel each day. That’s not repression or workaholism, that’s just human civilization.
Narcissism and collectivism don’t work well together; in fact, neither works well with much of anything, and some of us would argue that large-scale collectivism doesn’t work at all.
Now, Microsoft has about 228,000 employees worldwide. Somewhere in that mix, there must be at least some employees who are pro-Israel, and probably at least a few who are impassioned supporters of the world’s lone Jewish state. But I notice we don’t hear about those pro-Israel employees organizing sit-ins or breaking into executives’ offices. It’s almost as if the pro-Israel employees recognize that they work at Microsoft to do a job, selling software or programming code or working on research and development or whatever, and that Microsoft isn’t obligated to reorient its business decisions to align with particular employees’ foreign-policy priorities.
There were a lot of bad consequences of corporate America indulging the country’s woke mania during Trump’s first term and Joe Biden’s lone term. But a particularly big one was that it cultivated this outrageous sense of entitlement among lefty employees, who appear to have lost interest in doing their actual jobs and replaced it with an interest in attempting to strong-arm their bosses into transforming the company into a vehicle for progressive activism. There was never going to be a point where the progressive employees felt satiated or satisfied; there was always going to be some other hard-left objective that the company needed to prioritize over, you know, its actual way of making money.
*As you probably know, I’ve been writing columns for the Washington Post since October 2022 — and even before that, some freelance pieces for the Post’s Federal Page back in the Mesozoic Era.
ADDENDUM: On the every-weekday Three Martini Lunch program, Greg Corombos and I interview guests extremely infrequently. Some of this is because we’re highly selective and some of this is because I am extremely lazy when it comes to booking them. Before today, we have had seven in our 15-year history: legendary sportscaster Bob Costas; the late Joe Lieberman; New Hampshire’s former Governor Chris Sununu; former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino; author, historian, and Die Hard enthusiast Tevi Troy; actor, singer, and Die Hard veteran Robert Davi; and the longtime queen of sideline reporters and podcaster Michele Tafoya.
Today, we welcome our eighth guest in our history. We keep our guests secret until the show is posted online, but this is a man who’s been in the news for almost as long as Greg and I have been alive, and who is extremely consequential in one of the biggest political races of this year. And he’s absolutely hilarious.