CEO pushing back against “woke” employees bullying the company.
QUICK FACTS:
- Kraken CEO Jesse Powell is the most recent CEO to push back against “woke” employees who are using their emotional state to bully the company and other employees.
- Powell invited employees who felt “triggered” by company policy to accept a severance package and leave the company.
- The company adopted a new mission statement saying that they did not require a specific political ideology, but they do consider the ideal employee to be “thick-skinned and well-intentioned.”
- The CEO said in a recent interview that of the company’s 3,000 employees, about 30 have accepted the four-month severance pay and left.
- The departing employees cited their need to express political and social beliefs in the workplace.
- Powell said that following the departure of around 1% of his working force, saying that he thinks everyone else at the company is “ready to get back to work and stop being distracted.”
THE FUTURE OF A WOKE WORKPLACE:
- Scott Shepard, director at the National Center for Public Policy Research said it doesn’t appear to be the end of a woke culture in the workplace, but it could be a new phase: “Suddenly, nobody has any interest in this anymore, and companies are responding accordingly and starting to drop ‘woke.’ I don’t think this is the end of woke, I don’t even think it’s the beginning of the end, but to borrow from Mr. Churchill, I do think it might be the end of the beginning.”
- Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk ruffled feathers when he announced he planned to steer his new venture, Twitter, away from censorship and toward more freedom of speech, causing several SpaceX employees to denounce Musk’s decision. The employees said Musk’s efforts were “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment” for SpaceX.
- The individual was promptly terminated, with the company and SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell writing in an email to employees, “We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism.”
- The Athletic, a sports website owned by The New York Times, recently told staff to stick to sports and stay out of political activism.
- “We don’t want to stop people from having a voice and expressing themselves,” Paul Fichtenbaum, the publication’s chief content officer, said in a directive. “We just need to keep it from tipping over into the political space.”
BACKGROUND:
- Several large companies have seen monetary losses due to their affiliation with progressive causes, including entertainment companies like Disney and Netflix.
- However, some companies are doubling down on their support of liberal policies, including executives of Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Microsoft, Levi’s, and Major League Baseball, which chose to protest voter ID laws in Georgia in response to the threat of left-wing boycotts.
