It’s Getting Harder for Companies to Keep Politics Out of the Workplace

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Emil Lendof/WSJ, iStock

 

As Republicans prepared to gather at their party’s national convention in Milwaukee last month, restaurateur Paul Bartolotta and his team reminded the company’s wait staff of a longstanding policy: If a diner starts spouting political beliefs, try to stay quiet.

 

“If you hear something, it’s not your position to engage,” Bartolotta said he told his staff. “Let it play out.”

 

Like a number of businesspeople, Bartolotta is on a quest to keep politics out of the workplace this election cycle—a goal that many others are finding all but impossible to achieve as former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris head into the final 90 days of the presidential campaign.

 

This summer’s dizzying political developments, including the assassination attempt of Trump and President Biden’s decision to end his bid for a second term, have thrust talk of the election back into America’s offices, Slack channels, break rooms and work sites. That is complicating matters for bosses who hope to minimize disagreements among colleagues.

 

For much of this year, executives took pains to say as little as possible on presidential politics and other divisive topics, such as the continuing war in the Middle East. In one widely followed move, Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai told employees in April that the office isn’t a place to debate politics, noting “this is a business,” following protests at some of Google’s locations.

 

While that sentiment remains in many C-suites, a number of companies are now finding that ignoring political discourse altogether may be unrealistic in an election campaign that is proving to be so unpredictable—and all-consuming.

 

“I don’t think you can create an environment of zero politics,” said Jon Vander Ark, CEO of the trash hauler Republic Services. “This is what people talk about. It’s on their minds.”

 

Republic employs roughly 42,000 people, and Vander Ark said he knows his workforce has a range of political views. He has told leaders that he wants managers to emphasize civility between colleagues. Supervisors should break up conversations among workers if a conversation becomes overly heated or verges on proselytizing for one party. But some disagreements are bound to happen and can be OK, as long as they remain respectful, he said.

 

“As neighborhoods become more segregated politically, you just don’t meet people from different sides of the aisle. The workplace is one of the last bastions to do that,” Vander Ark said. “If we can create an environment where we foster respect for people with very different points of view, I think we’re making a contribution.”

 

How employers deal with charged topics in the office continues to evolve. In recent weeks, Salesforce created a new policy asking employees to stop talking about the war in Gaza in its Slack channels, a move that came after the company felt some employees were spending too much time debating such issues. Executives were also presented with a hiring plan to add more human-resources staff to help moderate the internal discussions, an indication for some that the discussions had gone too far, according to a person familiar with the matter.

 

Companies with front-line employees face their own challenges, particularly if customers try to draw workers into a political discussion. At Hilton, the hotel giant has expanded training programs for employees working at its properties to include de-escalation techniques designed to “lower the temperature” on a number of topics, including politics, said Laura Fuentes, the company’s chief human resources officer.

 

Delta Air Lines changed its policy after customers expressed frustration at seeing flight attendants wearing Palestinian flag pins.

Photo: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

 

Delta Air Lines in July banned its flight attendants from wearing non-U.S. flag pins on their uniforms after some customers expressed frustration at seeing flight attendants wearing pins of the Palestinian flag. The policy shift spurred its own complaints; some flight attendants advocating for union representation within the airline urged Delta to reverse its change, saying it restricted crew members’ ability to express themselves.

 

A patchwork of laws and regulations, including the National Labor Relations Act, offer some limited protections for workplace speech, but workers in the private sector aren’t covered by the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech. And every U.S. state except Montana operates under an “at-will” presumption, meaning employers can dismiss workers for any reason other than illegal ones such as religious or sex discrimination.

 

All this adds up to an environment where workers have little recourse if they are fired or a job offer is rescinded because of, say, their participation in a protest or political rally or their comments on social media.

 

One exception is Connecticut, where a law prohibits employers from disciplining or terminating a worker for expressing political or religious views. But even there, employers can argue that an employee’s speech or actions interfere with a company’s operations or with the cohesion and culture of a workplace.

 

Josh Goodbaum, an attorney with the New Haven, Conn., law firm Garrison, Levin-Epstein, Fitzgerald & Pirrotti, predicts courts will see a rise in cases aimed at clarifying the contours of workers’ rights around political speech.

 

“I don’t see this issue as a liberal versus conservative one,” he said. “I see this more as an issue of personal freedom. How much freedom do we sacrifice by working in the private sector?”

 

Part of the challenge is that Americans have become less tolerant of political beliefs that diverge from their own and of the people who hold those views, according to the Pew Research Center. The share of Democrats or Republicans who describe people from the opposite party as closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, unintelligent or lazy rose from 2016 to 2022, on some measures by more than 20 percentage points.

 

“With increasing social and political polarization, I think we’re seeing people have more and more trouble working with and coexisting with people who have fundamentally different political positions,” Goodbaum said.

 

Still, workplaces are forums where many want to process this political moment. On the Monday after Trump’s attempted assassination, Guy T. Williams, chief executive of Gulf Coast Bank & Trust in New Orleans, found that almost every one of his meetings or calls started with talk of the news. “It’s like trauma: People want to express it, share it, get it out,” he said.

 

Others are vowing to remain politically neutral in the months ahead. Bartolotta, the Wisconsin chef who runs more than a dozen restaurants near Milwaukee, including the popular Mr. B’s steakhouses, says he doesn’t plan to answer if any of his 850 employees ask him how he’s voting in the election.

 

“I have very strong beliefs, but I believe there’s a time and a place for it,” he said, noting he also does not share his political views publicly.

If servers grouse about patrons’ political leanings, he reminds them that they are paying customers and that the company is in the hospitality business, aiming to make them feel welcome.

 

“I know this is a politically charged season,” he told employees. “Stay focused on what’s most important, which is focusing on the guest experience.”

 

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