More Than Ever, Employees Want a Say in How Their Companies Are Run (qz.com)

Two readers share a report: While workers have traditionally looked to unions to address their grievances, a new generation is trusting in the power of petitions to force changes. At the Wall Street Journal, 160 reporters and editors, delivered a letter to their managers protesting the lack of women and minorities running the organization, Business Insider reported yesterday. "Nearly all the people at high levels at the paper deciding what we cover and how are white men," the letter read. IBM employees are circulating an online petition objecting to the tone of CEO Ginni Rometty's letter to US president Donald Trump, and calling on her affirm what they call the company's progressive values. [...] Other employee petitions call for Oracle to oppose US president Donald Trump's second travel ban, and to let men who work at US regional supermarket Publix grow beards. Employee petitions are now so popular there's a website, coworker.org, devoted to hosting them. In some cases, the campaigns work: Starbuck's relaxed its rules about visible tattoos and unnatural hair color for baristas after thousands signed petitions asking for a change. Sometimes, they fail disastrously. Interns at one (unnamed) company described in a blog about being fired en masse after signing a petition asking for a more relaxed dress code.

Comments

Re:this is really getting tiring

[quantaman]

- Different people from different viewpoints are almost invariably GOOD for an organization. Those that don't have diversity tend to wither and die due to stagnation.

Proof?

How about I just give you a solid argument because you surely realize that the statement "Different people from different viewpoints are almost invariably GOOD for an organization" is fundamentally hard to test.

A predominately male workplace will tend to breed a culture with misogynistic behaviours, Uber is a great example of this.

An organization where certain groups are under-represented will tend to do things that offend or otherwise harm those groups because there's no one internally to advocate for those groups.

An non-diverse organization will create a culture where people aren't aware they are offensive, where they get in a habit of making offensive jokes because there's no representatives of that group around to be offended. This is really bad when your organization has to deal with another organization and all your people come off looking like assholes.

People with diverse life-experience tend to have diverse skill-sets, the more diverse your organization the more likely you are to have people qualified to deal with unusual situations you experience. People working with different prior experience means you're also more likely to get a bigger set of potential solutions when trying to solve problems.