Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram on politics in the workplace: We're seeing a correction across the board

Growing tensions across the college campuses nationwide, raising some new questions about how to handle politics in the workplace and the implications for recruiting the next generation of talent. Joining us right now is Mihal Lavrov. I’m a Fortune editor at large who has covered technology in Silicon Valley for more than a decade. Good morning to you. I think we’re all trying to figure out what the implications of this are, whether whether companies are going to ultimately hire either some of these protesters. By the way, there’s a number of CE OS actually saying that they think that they would love to hire somebody who’s active and passionate about things and then others who say I would never want to hire any of these people. Yeah, I think different strokes for different folks. You’re definitely seeing a variety of of reactions to this. But it’s interesting that just as things are heating up so much politically across campuses and and across the country, of course spurred on by the Israeli Palestinian conflict and sort of the the the current iteration of the conflict, Silicon Valley at least is you know, a lot of companies are actually retreating from being really out there politically. And that’s what we’ve seen at Google just recently Meta going back, you know, a couple of years ago and I think that’s actually more of the position of a lot of Silicon Valley companies. So do you remember there was a moment probably two or three years ago after I think the murder of George Floyd where Brian Armstrong rank Coinbase came out with what seemed like a very, it was controversial at the time view that politics should not be in the office, there should not be social causes discussed, companies should not be engaged in pushing for social causes and the like. And to be honest with you, there were a lot of people who seemed outraged about that position. Now it seems that that position has become increasingly the norm. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase was completely vilified for asking employees to keep politics out of the workplace. This was in 2020 after George Floyd was killed, and there was a huge push among a lot of employees in in tech companies, not just in Silicon Valley, for their employers to take a stand. There were there was another smaller company, Base Camp, that held the same position. We don’t want, you know, there’s a time and a place for political and social activism. We don’t want it on our corporate channels and in the workplace because both companies felt that it was becoming very, very divisive and distracting and it was even creating so many divisions that there were people on teams that didn’t want to work together. So, you know, that’s how you know, that’s how much of an issue it becomes. So how have we swung so far from this idea that, you know, management used to say, Oh my goodness, we need to listen to our employees. We have to have a mission and we have to have a social purpose. And you know our customers are increasingly looking to us for political at least or not not political guidance, but you know where we stand as a company and who we are to now saying we don’t want to be anybody actually we we just want to do our, we just want to make our product and do our thing. Yeah, by the way, I think there always were, there was a contingency of of employees and of leaders who just wanted to like program and code. You know, not everybody wanted their company to take a stand on, you know, a variety of issues. But but yeah, absolutely there’s been a shift. I think that there’s been a bit of mission creep like literally and figuratively. I mean it is, it is mission, right. And you know what started as especially in Silicon Valley companies who had all these, you know, values, who had these big mission statements, I mean Google, don’t be evil and then do the right thing which they kind of, you know, transition to. But these really big broad statements allowed for Mission Creek. So you know, even if going back a few years, it made a lot of sense for them to take a stand on like you know, of course we’re for equal rights, of course we want our our world, you know, our earth to be saved and and to be protected. And then you know, Fast forward to today. Well, does that mean that these companies are also expected to take an anti Israel stance? Does that mean that they’re supposed to back out of a contract with the Israeli government, which is what Google employees were agitating for? No, you know that’s against their core business in a country, in a country like this right now. I mean it’s either 4949 with with two in the middle or or I don’t know what it is on all these issues and why would anyone in their right mind try to pick which who’s going to buy more sneaker that’s that’s the Michael Jordan it it just will last forever Republicans buy sneakers too I’m I’m not getting involved and and that’s that’s what we finally that’s where we’ve we’ve arrived because not everything is as simple as equal rights for all all there there are other issues that are that half the country really feels very strongly about that it is the opposite of what the other half of the country feels strongly about. So how do you know which side to weigh in on and and why do it if you’re gonna lose half of your customers. Yeah I mean look there’s the customers there’s also the employees right. And I think when it comes to Silicon Valley companies in particular, they’ve skewed younger in terms of the employee base. I mean that’s that’s that’s statistic you know for many, many companies that’s out there. And and and we see the, the political skew of younger generations, right. I mean look at what’s going on in college campuses. Not that everybody is out there protesting, of course. You still have a variety of viewpoints that are absolutely not being you know broadcast out there and they’re not necessarily the loudest voices. But I do think that with Silicon Valley companies it was almost this like natural inertia, you know, to to skew politically in a certain direction. But again, it just, it it got out of whack and we are seeing, I mean we’re seeing, I can only imagine if you if you let silicon left them alone and to to weigh in on this Israeli Hamas. I don’t even want to know where they’d come down. That doesn’t change the the fact though that 80%, it hasn’t changed polling, 80% of Americans are are behind Israel on this and all this stuff that’s been going on, none of that has changed. It didn’t. I don’t think you’d actually find that on the the polling out there would be on the other side of that, all these young people that they’re the same ones that are out. I don’t know, McCabe, you might feel differently. You know there’s reports now. You know Elon Musk, David Sacks, all these guys are putting together. Elon Musk is fundraising efforts. He’s the anti trump. He moved to Texas for a reason. He’s the anti silicon right. The rest of them, Zuckerberg, he’s probably in one of those tents. I’m not so sure. Probably in that tent. I’m not so sure about that. I think he’s not an intent maybe a nice skirt. Maybe he’s he wishes he was. He’s thinking about it.