In other words, he publicly harassed a colleague who (for what could be any number of perfectly valid reasons) preferred not to publicly state their beliefs. That would seem to me to be an eminently reasonable reason to fire someone. If you go around publicly harassing your colleagues to publicly state their political opinions, you deserve to be fired.
The fired employee Tweeted today:
>In the interest of transparency, I was let go for calling out an employee’s inaction here on Twitter. I stand by what I said. They didn’t give me the chance to quit [0]
He then specifically cited [1] the Tweet in question that was the cause:
>I asked @Vjeux to follow @reactjs's lead and add a statement of support to Recoil's docs and he privately refused, claiming open source shouldn't be political.
>Intentionally not making a statement is already political. Consider that next time you think of Recoil. [2]
This is specifically targeting an individual front-end engineer at FB, which in my own estimation crosses the line from criticism of executives or general policy, to specifically trying to instigate public outrage against a co-worker. If such actions were directed at me, I would definitely consider it as contributing to a hostile work environment. It all strikes me as a modern-day example of "Havel's greengrocer" [3].
[0] https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1271522288752455680
[1] https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1271531477209976832
[2] https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...
(Note: this doesn't mean I agree with the behaviour shown in this case - nobody says politics between colleagues must be done over Twitter.)
(edit: sad downvotes without actual logical counterpoint are sad.)
Does someone need to 100% support BLM (the political movement) to make an acceptable colleague?
What if someone: opposes racism and thinks police's use of force should be more regulated, but disagrees with some BLM tactics/approach to achieving change?
For example, what if the destruction of property from the protests, or calls to defund the police, actually cause a backlash at the next election and it reduces the chances of anything actually being done. Is someone allowed to make a critique like that?
The bottom line is there actually needs to be a diversity of thought to solve problems, and if you silence anyone who isn't 100% behind your message your not going to make change.
No, and I never said as much.
My point is that stuff like BLM is relevant enough that should not be considered a taboo subject between reasonable adults on the workplace. Nobody should be forced or publicly shamed into agreeing on this or that action, and there are well-known ways of resolving this sort of disagreement (i.e. voting) while respecting each other.
I am not supporting what happened in this case, I am only disagreeing with people in the thread turning it into an excuse to never talk about politics on the workplace. If we don't face problems and talk about them, we will never solve them.