I wonder if lilymc would object to a company reimbursing meals only if they were meat only.
Pfizer Macht Frei!
Openly Straight Man, Danke, Awarded Top Rated Influencer. Community Standards Enforcer.
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Originally Posted by tod evans
Yes, I think we all agree that people are free to associate with who they want to associate with, and if they don't like a company's policies, find another place to work.
As for influencing people, I see it differently. For example, when it comes to religion/faith, there are tons of scriptures throughout the Bible about sharing the Gospel, being a witness, taking the good news to the ends of the earth, etc. As for other things, there’s nothing wrong with trying to influence people, as long as no one is forced, and as long as it is done in an appropriate way. I'm sure there are many here who believe that we should try to influence people toward the message of liberty. The media/schools/powers-that-be are sure doing a good job influencing people in the opposite direction, so if we sit around and do nothing, how do we expect anything to ever change? But that's just what I believe, and I know that we all have different roles or 'callings' so maybe it's not for everyone.
“I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other.”
― Henry David Thoreau
And my employer was picking up my bar tab while I planned war parties. Picking up the Great Sagamores bar tab is a great sign of commitment to excellence .
Last edited by oyarde; 07-13-2018 at 07:25 PM.
Do something Danke
Would you think that is, as a condition of employment, they demanded you renounce Christ and become an atheist.
"Well, I'd get another job".
And when everybody demanded that?
“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” - Arnold Toynbee
If quitting were really an option, more people would do it.
1776 > 1984
The FAILURE of the United States Government to operate and maintain an Honest Money System , which frees the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, is the single largest contributing factor to the World's current Economic Crisis.
The Elimination of Privacy is the Architecture of Genocide
Belief, Money, and Violence are the three ways all people are controlled
Obviously I wouldn't work for a company that demanded that. And it's extremely far-fetched, but if they all did that, it wouldn't matter because I have my own company, and I never want to go back to working for someone else anyway. I like being able to choose who I work with.
“I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other.”
― Henry David Thoreau
And of course, it isn't.
We still have some folks that live in some sort delusional alter world, one in which people actually "own" anything, including a business.
The reality is that this is no more a free market than the man in the moon.
The reality is that this system, some sort of bastardized amalgam of mercantilism, fascism and centrally planned communism uses the agents of the state, corporations, to constantly nudge us cattle in the direction that the elites want us to go.
Rest assured, they are not giving up their T-bones, while all the rest of us are eating artificially engineered soy protein glop.
The genius of the elite class finally figured out that stoic calls to self restraint for the greater good of the New Soviet Man are pointless.
Package the proles chains in fancy colors and sparkly things...they will then fall all over themselves to pay for it...and will work under systems of control that rival anything you can think from the bad old days of the "company store" and "company town".
That is a demand that automatically intrudes into someone's private life since your religion is an all the time thing, if they start demanding certain behavior of their employees at home or if they even forbid them to bring meat lunches to work I will become a lot more concerned.
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Robert Heinlein
Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler
Groucho Marx
I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.
Linus, from the Peanuts comic
You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith
Alexis de Torqueville
Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it
A Zero Hedge comment
This point is why culture matters, we can't use government to make them pay for meat they don't want but we are in trouble if all companies start doing this or even go farther.
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Robert Heinlein
Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler
Groucho Marx
I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.
Linus, from the Peanuts comic
You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith
Alexis de Torqueville
Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it
A Zero Hedge comment
Anything in the name of savings and "efficiency".
Have you ever experienced a Southern Baptist?
They're thicker than ticks in the Ozarks and take this behavior to the extreme.
It's my belief that collectively they scare more people away from Christianity than they bring into the fold.
Not as far fetched as you might think...regular attendance at company defined religious services was very common in "company towns" as recently as the 1950s.
And is your company insured?
The insurance mafia might want to speak to you about such things.
You agree with this policy, so you're finding hard to argue against the idea that your employer can dictate what type of food you are going to eat.
Or at least what kind the employer is going to pay for when you are working for them.
I see a pattern here similar to most of American culture. Leaders of Groups have authority to tell the masses what to do. Starts in school, ends with your job. Cradle to Grave.
1776 > 1984
The FAILURE of the United States Government to operate and maintain an Honest Money System , which frees the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, is the single largest contributing factor to the World's current Economic Crisis.
The Elimination of Privacy is the Architecture of Genocide
Belief, Money, and Violence are the three ways all people are controlled
For your own protection. Don't forget to wear your helmet.
'Duly elected' leaders comrade, 'Duly elected'.....
Fixed it. The exceptions are few and far between and even they are not as different as some people think they are
If libertarians would accept the fact that humans want leaders and that they must be led to liberty and herded to stay there they might actually do some good.
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Robert Heinlein
Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler
Groucho Marx
I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.
Linus, from the Peanuts comic
You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith
Alexis de Torqueville
Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it
A Zero Hedge comment
https://slate.com/business/2018/07/a...at-policy.html
JULY 13, 2018
When bacon-wrapped figs (pictured at a June 20 storytelling event sponsored by New York Magazine and WeWork) are outlawed, only outlaws will nosh on bacon-wrapped figs.
Is it possible to eat vegetarian in Warsaw or Chengdu? Of course it is. Vegetarians have travelled the world happily for decades, and they can always somehow find a way. On the other hand, what happens if you’re representing a multibillion-dollar international real-estate giant, and you’re looking to expand your footprint in those cities by taking some of the biggest and richest landlords out for a swanky dinner? Obviously, you want to let them order what they want from the menu, and you want to pick up the check. But then you run into your employer’s draconian new meal policy.
WeWork’s 6,000 employees around the globe have now been told that they will no longer be able to expense meals including meat, in a move that will certainly reduce T&E expenses for the fast-growing company, but that will also cause a ridiculous amount of agita for its front-line staffers and, especially, the benighted HR folks tasked with enforcing the policy.
The company isn’t simply turning itself into a group of restaurant cops, either: It’s also banning meat (but not fish) from all corporate events on the grounds, handed down by co-founder Miguel McKelvey, that “avoiding meat is one of the biggest things an individual can do to reduce their personal environmental impact”.
WeWork, of course, has a substantial environmental impact of its own, almost none of which is food-related. It manages 10 million square feet of office space in 76 cities around the world, including Warsaw and Chengdu; across its 406 locations, some have much higher carbon footprints than others. As a tenant in those buildings, WeWork has very little control over how much energy they waste, but if it wanted to, it could confine itself to LEED-certified buildings. That way, landlords would have a strong economic incentive to make their buildings energy-efficient and therefore attractive to WeWork and other environmentally conscious tenants.
Instead, however, WeWork has created a system whereby, as a WeWork employee, I need to start worrying if I take a client out to lunch and she orders the brussels sprouts. (After all, any decent chef will tell you that the easiest and most effective way to make brussels sprouts delicious is to throw some bacon fat in there.)
Internally, WeWork’s policy is pretty incoherent: It bans lamb, for instance, and it bans chicken, but it doesn’t ban eggs. Eggs cause just as much environmental damage as chickens do, and much less than lamb does. It’s hard to see much environmental logic in a policy that’s fine with factory-farmed salmon but that forbids people from eating pigeon. (There are far too many pigeons in the world, eat as many as you want.)
Culturally, too, the policy makes little sense. If office managers want to serve delicious and healthy vegetarian food for their employees, that’s fantastic, but the ease of doing so, and the degree to which those employees will embrace the meal, varies wildly from city to city and from country to country. In New York or Tokyo, it’s easy to bring in a sushi chef who has amazing access to a huge range of fresh fish; in Kansas City or Buenos Aires, it’s much harder, and workers will be much less excited if you do. Vegetarians and pescatarians are a bit like Jews: They’re not only a minority, but they’re a very unevenly distributed minority, very common in some areas and almost unheard-of in others.
WeWorkers across the world will naturally burnish their environmental credentials in different ways. Some of them, to be sure, will cut meat and poultry out of their diet. Others will bike more, or refuse to buy a clothes dryer, or even decide not to have children. It’s arrogant paternalism of the highest order for a billionaire American co-founder, one whose own personal carbon footprint is surely in the top 0.1% of global citizens, to impose his own preferred environmental solution on thousands of employees who were probably doing much better than he was, on that front, all along. (McKelvey is building a multimillion-dollar mountaintop house in Utah.)
WeWork’s policy, then, is not really about environmental impact: There would be much easier and much more effective ways of reducing the companies carbon footprint. And while the policy will surely save a certain amount of money, I doubt that’s the driving motivation either. Instead, this is a perfect case study in virtue signaling. Call it performative vegequarianism: This is a policy that will gain McKelvey plaudits and social status among the woke billionaires of Powder Mountain, at the cost of massive HR headaches and generalized employee resentment in the kind of places he doesn’t particularly care about.
WeWork has thousands of active and engaged employees around the world, who, if challenged to improve the planet, would be able to do a much better job than this. But they were given no such challenge or opportunity; instead, they simply woke up today to a corporate ukase of dubious utility. The edict sends a clear message about the top-down structure of the company: The co-founders are happy telling the rest of the company how to live and work, and don’t require any kind of broad-based buy-in before doing so.
The most realistic outcome here is that the new policy gets quietly forgotten, and/or honored more in the breach than the observance. Ultimately, the imperatives of business development are likely to supersede the ill-considered utopian whims of any co-founder. But the whiff of condescension will linger for a while, and will be harder to eradicate than any stain of bacon fat.
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