This is kind of insane, even by virtue-signalling standards.
What business is it of the company what kind of food I eat? Alcohol restrictions make enough sense, but beyond that how is it at all reasonable to place these kinds of restrictions on their employees, especially when traveling for business? Some cities simply don't cater to the vegan market on a large scale. Sometimes you don't have as much of a choice what restaurant you're going to.
How will they even know what you ate? Receipts from restaurants often don't have that much detail. Are their Accounts Payable people going to scrutinize every receipt and google it up to determine if it's vegan compliant?
All I know is that if I'm looking for coworking space, it ain't gonna be from these guys.
> What business is it of the company what kind of food I eat?
They aren't policing employees' eating habits or anyone else's. They've just decided not to spend company funds on meat.
There are valid social, political, and environmental reasons to avoid most or all meat. A company should be able to decide not to spend their money on something both ethical and socially beneficial that won't harm anyone else in the process.
> How will they even know what you ate?
Some restaurants have line items, but most likely this is a marketing tactic more than a rigid policy that will be easily or thoroughly enforced.
> Some cities simply don't cater to the vegan market on a large scale. Sometimes you don't have as much of a choice what restaurant you're going to.
Where did you get vegan? They seem to be allowing expensing of vegetarian food.
And when do people not get to choose where they eat? And when they do, why would it be a place that serves zero vegetarian options?
Also, they seem to be pursuing a pescetarian policy (no mammals or birds, but fish are OK).
There are not valid environment or social reasons to avoid meat.
Cattle is the most efficient way to produce calories in a dry region in which water rather than land is the binding constraint (Western U.S., middle east, north africa). Crops are the most efficient way to produce calories in regions where land rather than water is the binding constraint (e.g. China, Northwest Europe).
The idea that one is necessarily more efficient than the other as a food is pure B.S. It just depends on where that food is grown.
There is a reason why the societies in the fertile crescent began with cattle culture, and continued to raise cattle in areas where water is more costly than land. Dry areas like that produce scrub and grasses, which is inedible to humans, but edible by cows. That's why we graze the cows in areas where we can't eat the natural crops, and instead we eat the cows. This is the most efficient method, most environmentally friendly method, and is the long standing practice of all societies living in dry regions.
This notion that the peculiar environment constraints that bind in northwest europe bind globally is either ignorance or bigotry.
Really, if they wanted to virtue signal, they should ban cotton, which takes up a lot of water, and is grown in areas that shouldn't be growing cotton. As good a case can be made against grains as against cattle.
This is just bumper sticker virtue signalling and has no place in the business world.
WeWork doesn't operate in the
(noncoastal) western US, so your argument is irrelevant to them. Most of us don't live in ancie Mesopotamia anymore. WeWork employees aren't expensing meals at Montana ranches.
1. Almost all of the entire entire Western U.S. (including most of california) is an arid area. It used to be called "The Great American desert". For more information, I'd recommend reading "Cadillac Desert"
2. Where WeWork is headquartered is not the point. The point is the notion that meat is bad stems of a view of the entire world having a certain climate where growing meat has much higher opportunity costs. Once we recognize that we do not live in a world like that, we can hopefully move on from these types of myths.
> And when do people not get to choose where they eat? And when they do, why would it be a place that serves zero vegetarian options?
When entertaining clients. Which are also the majority of my T&E reimbursements. If I invite a client to a lunch or dinner meeting, there's absolutely no way I'm going to dictate what they can and can't order. But if they order meat, is my expense report going to get rejected?
I'm not in sales, so I don't have outrageous meal expenses. But I do a fair bit of client servicing and I'd raise hell if my company created a policy that introduces ambiguity and risk around whether or not I'll have to eat the cost every time I'm expected to have a meal with a client.
I have been courted by WeWork, and our company was never wined and dined. I've never heard of them doing that, which makes sense because most of their tenants are small spenders. Many are individuals.
Some employees may do it, but I doubt it's a significant portion of expensed meals. I'm going to bet that the majority are catered food and team outings, which I've observed at WeWork on many occasions.
If they want to avoid being branded as brain dead hypocrites, they can't decide to allow one dietary choice over another. This is really just a hippie driven religious debate in lab grown meat's clothing.
You're begging the question. By labeling it virtue signaling, you've already dismissed it as false, as not a genuinely held moral position.
What if someone honestly believed that giving up meat was the moral thing to do, given the current conditions of the world?
Remember that nearly all of the things we now hold as self-evident (racial equality, gender equality, sexual orientation equality, etc) were once radical / crazy positions. Were the people who were ahead of the morality curve virtue signaling?
Are you trying to say that nothing can be labelled as virtue-signalling, then?
The moment you start broadcasting moral positions as corporate policies, you're virtue signalling. It's not always negative, or false, but it's certainly a marketing move.
> early all of the things we now hold as self-evident (racial equality, gender equality, sexual orientation equality, etc)
Not all of us believe in all of that in the sense in which you mean it.
> Were the people who were ahead of the morality curve virtue signaling?
Moral positions are not facts, they are beliefs. if a person believes meat is bad, then that individual can give up meat. Done. That was easy wasn't it? If they want other people to join the movement, they they can shout about it from the rooftops. However, nothing gives them the right to force their beliefs on anyone else? That's what religious hypocrites do. Think about how most of the other problems you mentioned were created. Religious fundamentalists forcing their beliefs on someone else.
WeWork is not "forc[ing] their beliefs on anyone". They are like the pre-US Civil War business that made it a policy not to do business with anyone who owned slaves or use any products of slavery. That's it. WeWork corporate funds won't be spent on meat. There is nothing they are doing other than that.
Speaking of things that "are not facts, they are beliefs", you should check your own. Religious fundamentalists did not create racism, sexism, homophobia or any other prejudice. Religions reflect the prejudices of the people, not the other way around. God did not create us in his image; we created him in ours. People can and will use the power of muscle, religion, science and even art in service of their power, their selfishness, their oppression of other. There was no religion that created Nazi Germany. There is no religion behind Trump's sexism, racism and corruption. There is no religion behind the tech industry's general sexism and refusal to acknowledge it. There is no religion behind humanity's environmental destruction.
There is only human selfishness. Just people unwilling to do the right thing because it involves giving up their advantage, whether its the advantage of their color, their gender, their tribe, the convenience of single-use plastic, or their ability to eat a diet that wouldn't be sustainable if everyone on the planet ate that same diet.
I say all this as a meat-eating atheist-leaning agnostic. If my prior paragraph applies to me and my meat consumption, it is something I must own up to, and do the right thing.
There are more religious people than SV/tech people trying to help the homeless. If anything, the growing inequality fueled by the power and dominance of tech and the tech class is pricing people out of homes and putting people out of work.
I'm certain the "real" Dr. Who would agree with me.
People aren't born with prejudices, they have to learn them. The most common source being religion. Without religion we wouldn't have had witch trials, the Crusades and a lot of other really miserable shit. What it didn't outright invent it codified and reinforced, it's just another way of making people afraid in order to control them.
> God did not create us in his image; we created him in ours.
Apparently you don't understand religion at all. This is exactly the opposite of what they believe. Your idea about man creating God is the atheist position. Fundamentalists believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God and his will must be obeyed. They differ only in interpretation and level of conviction.
Some people will use X to justify their behavior but most people are just too stupid for that. Evangelicals come to mind. They just believe whatever they are told because it makes them feel good or special. It's sheer intellectual laziness that allows their though processes to be corrupted or completely bypassed by religious dogma. Once it reaches a tipping point in the population you enable people like Hitler and Trump who will take advantage of the movement to get what they want.
> There are more religious people than SV/tech people trying to help the homeless.
The don't want to help, they want to assuage their own guilt by doing as little as possible. And you can be sure the only homeless they want to help are straight and white and don't live anywhere near their gated communities. The make token donations so they can forget about all the harm they really do by electing idiots who invent bathroom laws, anti-abortion laws, try to keep gays out of the military, kill people by taking away affordable healthcare, give huge tax breaks to the rich and millions of other shitty little laws.
Why would an alcohol restriction make sense instead? Why is alcohol worse than broccoli, hamburger, or ice cream?
Why is what they feed employees an important factor in a vendor? For example, would you check to see if other vendors pay their employees more, that might be more valuable than any lost reimbursement for meat at company meals? Do you check to see how well they treat people of all genders, races, and sexual orientations, or are obligated carnivores the only class of concern?
> Why is alcohol worse than broccoli, hamburger, or ice cream?
You do know what it does, right?
> Do you check to see how well they treat people of all genders, races, and sexual orientations, or are obligated carnivores the only class of concern?
Really not concerned with any of that at all. What I want is for employers to not spend their time telling me what I should think, or be, or eat. They can tell me what they want me to do, and what they're going to pay me for it, that's it.
> The startup has told its 6,000 global workers that they will no longer be able to expense meals including meat, and that it won’t pay for any red meat, poultry or pork at WeWork events
Title seems to be clickbaity -- they aren't banning meat, they are just no longer subsidizing it.
This seems to be a "startup PR act": they had to find some "new cool thing" to make people talk about them, that's what WeWork do, that's what most startups do.
It's not about money, it's not about virtue: they could as well have made flamethrowers or a tiny submarine or put ping-pong tables everywhere. It's a media distraction: everyone is focused on this now, and not on the real goal/activities (or finances) of the company.
Has anyone done the back of the envelope math on this? If you send an employee across the country and stop them from eating meat, does that offset the environmental damage of their flight?
Shaking out all the rabid anti-vegetarianists might who kneejerk response with seething hatred and without reading, might enough of the business benefit to overcome any costs of this policy.
also some here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17524534