GitLab Won’t Exclude Customers On Moral Grounds, Says That Employees Should Not Discuss Politics At Work

GitLab, a San-Francisco provider of hosted git software, recently changed its company handbook to declare that it won’t ban potential customers on “moral/value grounds,” and that employees should not discuss politics at work. The Register reports: The policy addition, created by co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij and implemented as a git pull request, was merged (with no approval required) about two weeks ago. It was proposed to clarify that GitLab is committed to doing business with “customers with values that are incompatible with our own values.” Such a declaration could run afoul of legal boundaries in some circumstances. While workers have no constitutional speech protection in the context of their employment, federal labor law requires that employees be allowed to discuss the terms and conditions of their employment and possible unlawful conduct like harassment, discrimination, and safety violations. But it’s perhaps understandable given how, over the past few years, workers in the tech industry have become more vocal in objecting to business deals with entities deemed to be immoral or work that conflicts with declared or presumed values. Sijbrandij amended his company’s handbook to state: “We do not discuss politics in the workplace and decisions about what customer to serve might get political.” And what reason does Sijbrandij’s pull request provide to support this position? It says, “Efficiency is one of our values and vetting customers is time consuming and potentially distracting.”