Happy Hallowe’en folks.

The intersection between employees and climate-related issues has been pretty loudly in the news lately, with striking workers at three of the biggest car manufacturers in the US – General Motors, Ford and Stellantis – demanding (among other things) that the shift to electric vehicles not be used as an opportunity by those companies to lower labour standards.

At times the companies have tried to portray the workers as obstacles to or opponents of the green transition. In fact, employees at these companies (and their union, the United Auto Workers) were pushing for better environmental standards in the vehicles they were producing as far back as 1970. Further evidence that we wouldn’t be in half the mess we are on environmental and social issues if companies just listened to their employees more.  

On which note, some employees at Volkswagen are going even further. They point out that while electric vehicles may be an improvement on the status quo, they’re still carbon- and resource-intensive to produce, and that simply replacing existing vehicles like-for-like is not sufficient. We need better public transport and to design our urban centres more around cycling and walking.

This newsletter marks the one-year anniversary edition of the Honest Work newsletter(!). This one will be the last instalment for a while with the newsletter going on temporary hiatus, in part to free me up to better pursue the fruits of my own employee activism in my professional life.

To keep you busy in the meantime, this newsletter is a rundown of some of the best resources out there on employee activism, packaged in just about every format you could possibly desire.

A story to read – An anonymous worker tells their story of successfully getting their tech company employer to drop a client, a biometrics identification company which the worker feared could be contributing to privacy breaches and human rights violations. Despite the happy ending, the worker points out that efforts to push for a more ethical company can be risky and lonely – anyone seeking to do something similar needs to walk in with their eyes open.

Something more topical – There’s been a lot of coverage in the past year about carbon offsetting and the many, many problems with the market for carbon credits as it currently operates. The New Yorker ran an exposé about a company in this space, South Pole. Employee activism is only a small part of this story, but nonetheless there’s inspiration to be had at the preparedness of some workers to speak up about shady practices, and even resign when all else fails. The gradual corruption of the company’s founder from idealist to ethically compromised is also an example of why employee activism is needed to keep companies honest.

Something to watch – This TED talk from last year gives a handy overview of employee activism. It points out how companies have been stating they welcome employees speaking up but when it comes to environmental and social issues they haven’t tended to seek or listen to employees’ views. The talk also includes a way to evaluate how companies have responded to employee activism.

Something lighter to watch - One of these films!

Something to listen to – For something a little bit more practical, this podcast goes over strategies for how employees can change their workplace from within, such as by visualising the problem, shrinking the change to something achievable, and appealing to existing values and identities within the company.

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That should keep you busy for a little while. In any case, there’s so much content being produced these days that it’s quite easy to keep on reading and watching and never actually doing, so during this hiatus get out there and push for a change! The Honest Work website has lots of resources to help, and for more tailored support feel free to reach out directly at emmet@honestwork.org .

Until we meet again.

While Gore has long been outspoken about the climate denialism of fossil fuel companies, others had hoped they could play a more constructive role in the green transition. Over the past year though that optimism has faded as many companies have scaled back their climate targets in response to booming oil revenues. “I thought fossil fuel firms could change. I was wrong” was the headline of an opinion piece by Christiana Figueres, a climate negotiator. The Church of England, which held investments in many fossil fuel companies and had been vigorously engaging with them to improve their climate performance, announced it would divest its holdings in response to the lack of progress.

There is an increasing sense then that the industry is unlikely to provide even the mildest supportive tailwinds for the transition. Policy changes and disruptive technologies from newcomers were always going to play a bigger part in the solution than self-directed transformation by fossil fuel incumbents, but it’s increasingly in doubt that the latter will play any part, other than to obstruct.

What does this mean for sustainability-minded workers who want to influence the fossil fuel industry?

Workers influencing the industry from the outside

The most obvious thing that employees outside of the industry can push for is for their employer to switch to 100% renewable energy, reducing the demand for the industry’s products.

Beyond this though, many companies have other relationships with the industry, as customers or partners. For these companies and their employees, it appears they have three options to guide their work with the industry: boycott, be selective, or be indifferent. 

Some employees have pushed for some form of boycott - at tech giant Microsoft, the consultant McKinsey, the PR company Edelman, employees advocated and organised to try to get their companies to drop all fossil fuel clients and stop facilitating their negative impacts on the planet.

The challenge is that for many, the fossil fuel industry is more than a source of energy: it is a source of revenue. It has deep pockets, and service providers are not eager to turn their back on it. And so the frequent line that company executives take in response to employee advocacy is “the industry needs our help. We should work with them to support them in transitioning” (this was the response in all three of the examples mentioned above).

Which sounds sensible, in theory. The issue is that in practice few fossil fuel companies appear genuinely interested in transitioning, and so a blanket agreement to “work with the industry” ends up facilitating continued obstruction and extraction.

Microsoft published energy principles last year that partly emerged out of a dialogue with employees, setting out how it will work with the industry. It contains a stated commitment to selectiveness. For certain specialised services it could provide to fossil fuel companies, it pledged to only provide these to companies with a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

This sounds like being selective, but is actually close enough to indifference. Of the 171 major emitters targeted by investor initiative Climate Action 100+ for engagement, 75% have net zero targets.1 This is not a meaningful signal of an intention to transition. 2050 is a long time away, and many companies have sought to increase their fossil fuel production and exploration to exploit higher oil prices while maintaining their long-term target.

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Maybe Microsoft has the right idea, but has chosen a poor metric. Emissions need to be halved by 2030, so we need to focus on shorter-term indicators. Nearer-term targets (emission reductions by 2025 or 2030) and companies’ capital expenditure plans (whether their investment plans are aligned with the Paris agreement’s objectives) show a much more accurate picture of who is actually committed to transitioning.2

Focusing on shorter-term indicators is also more relevant for the work of a service provider - they’re trying to help a company with what it’s trying to accomplish today, not its tentative aspirations 30 years down the line.

The figures for companies with short-term commitments are so low in fact that some might argue that only agreeing to work with such companies comes close to a full industry boycott. But if more consultants, PR companies, banks, insurers and other service providers aligned on a common expectation, it could be more effective than a boycott at pushing those companies to take an achievable step forward.

The consultancy Deloitte recently released a survey of Millennials and Generation Z (collectively, those born between the early 80s and early 2010s), looking in particular at their relationship with work. It contained a few interesting findings:

• Nearly 4 in 10 respondents said they have rejected work assignments due to ethical concerns.

• More than a third have turned down employers that they feel aren’t doing enough on matters such as the environment, diversity, or mental health. 

• Only half feel empowered to drive change at work, while one-third say that decisions are made from the top down within their organisations and that their feedback is not often acted upon.

• 7 in 10 have tried to minimise their own personal environmental improvement, though only 15% feel able to influence their organisation’s efforts on sustainability.

One clear takeaway from this is that the dissatisfaction you might be feeling with your company’s environmental or social impact, and the desire to change it, is probably not limited to you. A significant number of your colleagues, maybe even a majority, are likely feeling the same way. We don’t tend to discuss it; partly because the feeling is so ubiquitous that it’s almost taken for granted, treated as inevitable. And partly because we don’t believe that us lowly employees have the power to change it.

But if enough of us feel the same way, we do have the power to change it. Our companies may not be democracies, but they depend upon our labour and our cooperation to continue doing the things they do. The uptick in strikes and unionisation we’ve seen in the past couple of years show employees are starting to re-learn this. Employees have also used this realisation to achieve social and environmental impact, in companies as diverse as Walmart, Microsoft and Deloitte itself.

What’s missing is often a spark, someone to convert the passive preferences of colleagues for a more sustainable company into the will to achieve it. That spark could be you, even if you’re just a teensy weensy ant:

Don’t let the fact that these are talking animated ants fool you; this is happening in the real world too. Some employees are saying enough is enough. This summer alone provides some varied examples.

Last month marked 2 years since workers took over an automotive plant near Florence, Italy. In July 2021, the workers discovered that they were suddenly being made redundant; their employer blamed the transition to a greener economy. Faced with the unexpected loss of livelihood, they rose up, occupied the factory, and have been crowdfunding to set up a workers’ co-operative manufacturing sustainable cargo bikes and other technology to support decarbonisation. 

It’s as good an example as any showing what can happen when workers become aware of their own power and expand the realm of what’s possible. Their counterparts in the UK called off a strike to negotiate with the company and ended up facing mass redundancies, showing the seemingly safest course is not always the least risky.

Don’t feel like taking over your place of work just yet? In less radical but still significant news, a campaign has been launched in the U.S. by ClimateVoice, calling on employees to improve the indirect lobbying practices of their employers. Several American companies are supportive of climate action themselves, and agree that stronger regulation is needed.

However, many of these same companies are members of trade associations with strong anti-climate records, perhaps none more than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which reliably finds itself on the opposite side of any policy that could have a positive impact on the environment. The ‘Escape the Chamber’ campaign calls on employees to push their companies to leave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and stop funding their climate obstructionism. Whether your company is a member of the Chamber or not, understanding their political donations and lobbying activities can be worthwhile.

And finally, perhaps as important as knowing when to push is knowing when to walk away. The Financial Times recently (briefly) covered the story of a Shell employee in Germany who became frustrated with the company’s backpedalling on its emissions reductions targets, and decided to throw in the towel. He’s the latest in a long line of fossil fuel workers to have grown weary of their fossil fuel employers’ poor climate record, and moved onto pastures new.

Whether it’s radical collective action, pushing for incremental but achievable reforms, or permanently withdrawing your labour from a lost cause employer, your workplace is a powerful medium for making the world a better place. You just need to find the mechanism that’s right for you.

Events

Join me next week at Crowdsourcing Sustainability’s Climate Jobs Fair, at a session titled “Climate At Work: How to Be A Climate Advocate Right Where You Are”. Tuesday 5th September, 6.30pm BST. If you’re feeling it.

You’ve read about the history of employee activism, countering slavery, fascism, overdevelopment, apartheid. You’ve read about some of the incidents of employee activism from just last year - on climate change, animal testing, surveillance tech.

But have you ever noticed it in some of your favourite films and TV shows?

The Incredibles

15 years after retirement, the former superhero Mr Incredible is now Bob Parr, insurance claims adjuster. Bob is in the midst of denying an old lady’s insurance claim when he has a change of heart, and gives her a roadmap on how to navigate the company’s bureaucracy and get her claim through. It’s not the first time, and he gets chewed out by his boss.

Bob’s manager seems prepared to deny legitimate insurance claims to boost profitability, a problem unfortunately not confined to fiction. Bob refuses to help exploit customers even though it would get his boss off his back.

Bob then throws his manager through several walls, a tempting tactic but one which most employee activism campaigns would do best to avoid.

Jerry Maguire

Sports agent Jerry Maguire gets frustrated with dishonesty in his industry and writes a mission statement calling for “Fewer clients. Less money.” - a way for better experiences for customers and better work-life balance for staff. He prints off a copy for every one of his colleagues.

His document was named “The Things We Think and Do Not Say”, a relatable title for many workplaces. His colleagues welcomed his speaking truth to power, giving him a standing ovation when he arrives to work.

And then he gets fired and declares his love for black people.

Scrubs

Season 6, Episode 13 - My Scrubs

In Sacred Heart, staff across the hospital work together to ensure that an uninsured patient can still get treatment, passing her off as a recently deceased patient whose insurance will cover her care.

Man, the mere thought of the messed up U.S. healthcare system is enough to make this European ill. It’s by and large a public policy failure, though pharmaceutical companies could also do more to improve access to medicine.

At least no one gets fired in this one! What’s a bit of fraud between friends…

Better Call Saul

Season 5, Episode 3 - The Guy for This

Kim Wexler is a lawyer in the show Better Call Saul, prequel to the cult classic Breaking Bad. Kim works at a typical medium-sized corporate law firm, where she heads up the banking division, but her real passion is pro bono work for vulnerable criminal defendants.

In one episode, Kim is called away from a pro bono case after insistent calls from her main banking client, who wants an old man kicked out of his home so they can knock it down and build a call centre. Kim gets stung by an accusation from the cantankerous old man:

You’re one of those people that give a little money to charity every month, so you can make up for all the bad that you’ve done. You go to a soup kitchen once a year on Thanksgiving, that makes you feel a whole lot better about yourself… I don’t know how in the world you sleep at night.

She threatens him but later, feeling guilty, she sneaks back in the dead of night to try to make amends, offering to sacrifice her own time and money to help him and offset the impact she was having on him through her work.

Pro bono can be a source of meaning for lawyers and other professionals, but it can also be used to distract from the impact of their business-as-usual work. Law Students for Climate Accountability is one attempt to help potential recruits get a better picture of how law firms are really impacting climate change through their client work.

The Green Mile

This film is based on a Stephen King novel, telling the story of a group of death row prison guards and the men they were overseeing, including one with supernatural powers.

There are a few examples of what could be deemed employee activism here, as the guards bend the rules in various ways to make life for the prisoners a bit more pleasant, but one of the most memorable moments is when the main character (played by Tom Hanks) is tempted to let one of the prisoners go, faced by the conflict between what is right and what his job requires him to do:

On the day of my judgement, when I stand before God, and he asks me why did I kill one of his true miracles, what am I going to say? That it was my job?

And for one based on a true story:

Snowden

A biopic whose protagonist you’ll hopefully be familiar with, Edward Snowden is a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) who discovers the extent of secretive government surveillance programmes and becomes a whistleblower, exposing the truth to the public.

Snowden shows the price one can pay for staying true to their beliefs at work: he has spent the last decade in Russia in exile, unable to return home where he is a wanted man.

In fiction, the “right” thing to do often seems so obvious, and we just assume we would act the same in that situation. In reality though it’s less clear, it can seem like a grey area, or is hidden under the surface. Through our workplaces, most of us are connected one way or another to issues like climate change, human rights infringements, poor treatment of animals - issues that will probably seem like such clearcut wrongs in years to come. Have a dig around to see what you can do.

So, you little purposeful worker you, once you’ve decided you want to push your company to be more ethical or more sustainable, how do you work out what that really looks like? Large companies in particular have footprints that are global and impacts so diverse that it can be difficult to work out where to actually begin.

Employees have challenged company practices across a range of areas. In 2022 alone, known incidents of employee activism included challenging employers’: operations in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine; development of surveillance technology; hosting of allegedly transphobic content; positions on abortion; animal testing. And, of course, climate change – everything from the sustainability of yoga pants to brokering insurance for an oil pipeline in east Africa.1

Waves of employee-employer clashes are often driven by issues that are topical at a given moment. Last year, that was the conflict in Ukraine. In 2020, there was widespread focus on racial issues following the death of George Floyd. And in 2018-19, employees in multiple sectors sought to end their companies’ relationships with U.S. border agencies following the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant families (the infamous “kids in cages”). In each case, employees became aware of an issue in the news, which prompted them to look within their own sphere of influence to see how they could make a positive impact.

The upside of this approach is that the topical nature of these issues tend to mobilise large number of employees to speak up and get involved with internal advocacy efforts. When employees have gone public with their concerns it has also generated a lot of media attention, increasing the pressure on companies to accede to employee demands.

The downside is that frequently such issues are only loosely connected with companies’ own main sphere of influence and material impacts. Thus employers might view or characterise employees’ concerns as immaterial or a distraction, and even if employees’ efforts are successful they may constitute little more than a symbolic victory. Furniture company Wayfair is perhaps a good example of this; employees there walked out after discovering the company had sold furniture to a U.S. border detention centre, prompting a company town hall on the issue. The action was ultimately unsuccessful, with the founder stating the company should remain neutral regarding to whom they sell their products. Yet even if they’d achieved their goal, would it have struck even a minor blow against U.S. immigration policy?

Symbolic actions can of course be important, but for multi-billion dollar companies such as Wayfair, their impacts are real and far-reaching. Given the effort that goes into employee organising, it is worth considering what goals should be prioritised.

Finding your company’s main impact areas

For many companies, their main impacts are going to be glaringly obvious. At an energy company, their contribution to climate change via emissions is obviously critical. At social media companies, their approach to content moderation is likely the most significant issue. For others, though, some digging beneath the surface may be needed. Renewable energy companies obviously make significant contributions to the fight against climate change, but many have mixed impacts on human rights.

There’s no rule of thumb; a company’s main sources of positive or negative impact will vary company-to-company and industry-to-industry. It may arise from the nature of the product or service itself (tobacco, weaponry, tax consulting services); the product supply chain (clothing, fish, chocolate); whether the product or service is made too widely or not widely enough available (medicine, bank lending, insurance underwriting).

There are a number of potential sources of information to dig into how your company impacts people and planet:

• The Honest Work website (naturally) – this has a number of pages on different industries and the main issues they face, as well as a page on cross-cutting issues like climate change and human rights. Where available, NGO reports comparing different companies in a sector are included – maybe your company is among them.

• Third-party sources – there are a range of websites used by investors, consumers and others to evaluate the sustainability and ESG performance of companies and catalogue disclosures. Much of it is behind a paywall, but ones with at least some publicly available information include Refinitiv and Sustainalytics (for external ratings and data), CDP (for emissions data), Ethical Consumer (for consumer goods companies).

• Company’s own disclosures – most companies will produce an annual report, and publicly-listed companies will produce additional reporting. These are long documents and will require a lot of digging and reading between the lines. Sustainability reports can indicate challenges on which the company is making progress, while sections in the annual report on “risk factors” and “litigation” can also reveal information that otherwise won’t be proactively communicated. Public companies will also have AGMs where shareholders may submit proposals asking companies to improve certain practices, so it may also be worth seeking out their proxy statement.

• Ask your sustainability team (if you have one) – because of its interest to many staff, some companies have internal channels where staff can receive updates on the company’s sustainability function. If not, consider reaching out to find out what they’re working on and what are the main challenges.

• Internet search engines – if all else fails, that’s what Google and all the others are for. You can set up a Google News Alert (e.g. “[Your company name] + ESG”) to stay up to date on stories related to your company.

All that being said, a good employee change strategy will balance the impactfulness of the change they’re trying to make against other factors – in particular, something which is popular enough to mobilise colleagues, with a change that is narrow and realistic enough to be achievable. More on that in a later newsletter.

Last month in employee activism

At Amazon, somewhere between several hundred and 1,000+ employees participated in a protest concerning a combination of the company’s return-to-office mandate and under-counting its carbon footprint. The company’s commitment to achieve net zero emissions by 2040 is itself a product of employee activism, in 2019.

For many people today, work is an important source of purpose.

This is not the new phenomenon it is sometimes made out to be - you can find roots in Ancient Greek philosophy (apparently) - but it has definitely grown in prominence and dominance. A 2020 survey found that 93% of employees agreed that “now more than ever before, companies must lead with purpose”.

I suspect this growth is partially due to the decline in people’s other sources of purpose. Much of the wealthy world is experiencing weakening of community bonds, reduced religious participation, less sex, rises in loneliness and drops in trust. All of which leaves people placing more and more hope in the workplace to plug the “meaning” gap that has opened in their lives.

It is a need that many employers have been only too willing to tap into. Large U.S. tech companies were in the forefront here, with lofty mission statements (Facebook aims to “bring the world closer together”) complemented by a sense of community and all manner of perks, the result of which was employees with fewer incentives to leave the workplace than ever before.

There has been a strong backlash to the trend of more and more people allowing their job to form a significant part of their identity. Some argue that this is a way for employers to wring more work and effort from purpose-hungry employees and pay them less money in return.1 Eventually, it is said, many of these employees will come to realise that for all the sweat and tears and devotion they’ve put in, work doesn’t love them back.

Many companies’ embrace of purpose sounds awfully like marketers’ constant attempts to convince us that the purchase of some good or service will make us better people or fill some great void. Owning an Apple product suggests you think differently. Drinking Pepsi will help you live bolder and miraculously help protestors and police put aside their differences. And dealing with customer queries at a luggage company is equivalent to “joining a movement”.

Work: somewhere between purposeful and purposeless

As with most arguments, both sides are partially right. The backlash against (too much) purpose at work rightly points out that the promise of self-fulfilment can be a powerful tool of exploitation, tricking employees out of demanding their due at a time of record inequality. It can also create a vicious circle: reducing the time and energy people have for community life outside of the workplace, causing relationships to fray and institutions to crumble, further narrowing the non-work options for those seeking a sense of purpose, belonging, fulfilment.

And yet as with many backlashes, there is a risk of overcorrection. When work gets classified as nothing more than how executives trick the foolish masses into giving up happy blissful leisure to make the rich richer, it ignores that in most jobs people earn money by creating value for others. Providing dental care, farming crops, sewing shawls, manufacturing engines, painting art. The actual utility of each of these acts varies, but generate utility they do. And when it comes to solving the big challenges like fighting climate change and poverty, defending human rights and biodiversity - which even the greatest cynic would confess are meaningful goals - it will be workers that help us get there.

It is not only that being overly sceptical about purpose can cause us to miss out on the positive impact and meaning that our work produces. There’s also the fact that many of us work for companies that are generating serious harms for society, whether we are aware of them or not. And a clock-in, clock-out attitude to work can discourage people from deepening their understanding of the impacts their work contributes to, and doing something about it.

As journalist Jamie Calven put it: 

One of the dangers is that people will instead become demoralized and retreat into denial, that they will seek refuge amid the pleasures and fulfillments of private life. That would give carte blanche to power. There was a term used in central Europe to describe those who opted to retreat into private life under totalitarianism. They were called ‘internal emigres.’ That is certainly tempting at a time like this: to live one’s life in the wholly private realm, enjoying the company of friends, good food and drink, the pleasures of literature and music, and so on. Privileged sectors of our society are already heavily skewed that way. It’s a real danger at a time like this. If we withdraw from public engagement now, we aid and abet that which we deplore.2

Honest work is purposeful work

In a world full of staggering challenges and widespread apathy, the last thing I want is for people to lose their sense of purpose in the precise setting where they can potentially have the greatest impact.

What I want is for people’s sense of purpose at work to be informed by the impacts their companies have on the world, and be harnessed in addressing those impacts. Because while just about all work may create value for someone, it may be outweighed by the value it wipes out for many more. Airlines might enable people to have unforgettable experiences, but if they had to account for the environmental damage they caused, many would cease to exist.

Employees’ access to negative information about their companies is often limited, and thus they can end up buying rosy stories about the impact they’re having. In a survey of oil company employees, for example, nearly 100% of those working in the marketing departments believed their company was somewhat ready for the energy transition - yet this belief was shared by just 44% of engineers and 20% of those in finance roles. This mixed access to information is why the Honest Work website hosts a range of resources to help employees understand the sustainability and ethical issues their companies are involved with, as well as leaderboards for how their company performs compared to peers (just check “How’s your company doing” on any of the “What to change” pages).

So work has plenty of potential for purpose, just maybe not the one your employer is trying to sell you on. Sometimes you have to dig a little deeper, understand what your company’s true impacts are . . . and then decide what you’re going to do about it.

Happy International Workers’ Day eve (depending on your time zone)!

Tomorrow, May 1, is IWD; also known as Labour Day or May Day. It’s a day celebrating the achievements and commemorating the struggles the labour movement has experienced. It’s why you may have the day off, if you’re lucky.

It has its origins in the fight for an 8-hour workday. This is something many of us now take for granted in wealthy nations, but there was a time when it was quite unimaginable - during the Industrial Revolution in the UK, workers often toiled for 12-16 hours a day, 6 days a week.

The fight for work which earns enough to ensure a good standard of living while allowing enough time to enjoy that life is a fight that continues. Today’s cost of living crisis paired with the growing threat of automation (including via AI) suggests a renegotiation of the social contract needs to be on the cards. We also need to drastically improve working conditions in poorer countries; a decade on from the Rana Plaza tragedy, progress has been made but equity remains far off.

Yet we also need to broaden our imagination of what a fair world for workers looks like. The massive uptick in employee activism on environmental and social issues in recent years shows that employees aren’t prepared to settle for a fat paycheque, and the rest of us would be a lot happier and safer in the world they’re trying to build.

A right to honest work

In many countries, employees have rights to organise collectively (e.g. through a trade union) to advocate for improvements to their working conditions. This creates better protection against unfair treatment, unsafe working conditions, and significant improvements in income and wealth - one U.S. study suggested the average worker could earn $551,000 more over the course of their career by joining a union.

And yet if we want our companies to support human flourishing rather than merely material security, I would argue that existing rights fall far short of what’s needed. We live in a world where work forms an increasingly important part of our identity while, simultaneously, we grow ever more aware and conscious of the moral implications of our actions. In such a world, having a way to safely express concerns with the sustainability and ethical impacts of our employers, and suggest ways in which they can improve, could be a way of ensuring greater dignity at work.

Of course, one could argue that workers who find a misalignment between their values and those of their company can simply switch employers. True, although increasingly concentrated industries and labour market monopsony means workers are often not flush with choices, especially if they don’t wish to relocate. Also, the alternatives aren’t necessarily any better; in a recent human rights assessment of 127 large companies across 3 sectors, the average score was 17%, with only one company scoring above 50%.

Which leads me to the other reason why we need “a right to honest work”: it would likely lead not only to greater dignity at work, but a better world for all of us. Survey after survey after survey has shown that employees want stronger environmental and social performance from the companies they work for. Given the stat above on unionised workers earning over half a million more than their non-unionised counterparts, imagine how much lower emissions might be, or how many fewer human rights abuses could be committed, if workers had the right to influence their companies’ practices.

Share Honest Work

What would a right to honest work look like?

If the goal is to enhance worker influence over the environmental and social practices of their employers, how could that be realised? Here are 3 options:

1. A right to conscientious objection - many will be familiar with the concept of conscientious objection to performing military service, as a  legitimate exercise of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This sometimes extends to other professions; for example, medical professionals may refuse to provide procedures which go against their beliefs, and abstention from work activities which conflict with religious beliefs may be protected under indirect discrimination laws. Firms such as McKinsey also allow employees to refuse to work with clients they regard as unconscionable.

   In theory, then, a right could be more firmly established and universally recognised which would allow a worker to opt out of particular activities or client relationships that conflict with genuine and reasonably held beliefs, provided they do not make a worker unable to perform a substantial portion of their job.

2. Broadening workplace organising protections - generally, collective worker action is understood as protected only to the extent that it relates to working conditions. This could be expanded to include action related to the environmental and social practices of an employer, provided such impacts are material and/or are of genuine concern to a sizeable number of employees.1

3. Improving employee participation in corporate governance - employees and their representatives already have the right to serve on the boards of companies in various countries, most notably in Germany. Workers’ councils are an alternative or additional form of institutionalised worker voice within companies, although the scope of decisions which they can influence may vary. More countries could enable these mechanisms, and recognise the sustainability and ethical impacts of employers as a legitimate area of employee concern.

The last of these options is the most important, although it is also the most politically sensitive and efforts to introduce it where it doesn’t already exist are often hotly contested. In any case, it is not a silver bullet, and expanding workplace organising rights as per the second option would be a complimentary way to improve employee influence over issues beyond the “bread and butter”.

In times of precarious work, a cost of living crisis and massive inequality, worrying about worker influence over the impacts of their companies might seem hopelessly out of touch or a distant nice-to-have. Yet these problems arise in no small part from the decisions that many large companies make - to engage in exploitative pricing practices, to lobby against clean energy policies that would have lowered energy bills, to avoid paying their fair share of taxes which fund our public services. Maybe overcoming workers’ collective exclusion from these decisions would lead to better outcomes.

Event

Free on Thursday? I’ll be joining the Undercover Activist for an event with workers interested in changing their workplaces for the better. A good chance to dip your feet in the water! Register here.

Last month, arguably the world’s most famous newspaper found itself embroiled in a public conflict. The New York Times (NYT) received a letter (Letter #1) signed by over a thousand contributors and staffers accusing the paper of editorial bias in how it covers transgender issues. In short, Letter #1 alleges the NYT has covered issues related to trans children excessively and omitted relevant details about quoted sources.

Less than a week later, there was another letter (Letter #2). This one was signed by dozens of NYT journalists, and addressed to the president of the NewsGuild of New York, the trade union which represents many NYT employees. The president had suggested that Letter #1 should be considered as raising concerns related to workplace conditions (and thus protected under law). Letter #2 rejected this argument, saying that such logic would threaten journalistic independence, and suggested that the coverage in question had been factual and accurate.1 For now, it appears senior decision-makers at the NYT align with Letter #2.

Setting aside the substance of this debate, the NYT debacle raises some interesting questions about employee activism and worker voice.2 When we read headlines and reports of employee activism, the demands made tend to come across as the will of the employees at large, but this is often not the case. “Employees Call on Deloitte to Stop Working With ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement]”; yet a survey suggested a majority of employees preferred continuing its work with the agency. “Disney employees are staging walkouts over Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill”; yet the walkouts were followed by an open letter from other employees criticising the company for then taking a stance on the issue.

Are companies damned if they do, damned if they don’t? What does this mean for employees trying to change their organisations from within?

The end game of employee activism

As employees increasingly weigh in on the sustainability and ethical choices of their companies, disagreements are bound to emerge. There are many who would argue that this is precisely why employees should stay out of these issues, and confine any workplace organising to traditional issues such as pay and working conditions, where there is likely to be more consensus.

I believe such thinking is mistaken for two reasons:

1. Having some degree of influence over what you work on and how it impacts the world should be seen as a basic expectation of dignity at work. Not everyone has the luxury of a variety of options when it comes to where they work. Workers should not have to choose between working for their community’s main employer and raising concerns about that employer’s pollution of the local environment.

2. Enlightened employees changing their companies from within appears to be one of the strongest, underutilised levers for building a more just and sustainable world. More and more companies have pointed to employee sentiment as motivating an improvement in their practices, and survey evidence suggests this will only grow.

There is a tension between these two reasons; (2) suggests that “legitimate” employee activism is that which advances just causes in the eye of the beholder. Of course, as the NYT case demonstrates, what is right and just in any situation is subjective, so it is not a very useful principle for navigating disagreements. (1) suggests that the more legitimate cause will be the one which is backed by the greater number of employees.3

This latter view may sometimes result in outcomes with which many will disagree – witness, for example, the history of trade unions for fossil fuel workers opposing climate action. But with strong majorities of employees favouring better environmental and social practices by their employers, this is still the more likely to lead to substantial and durable improvements on the status quo, while avoiding domination by a vocal minority.

Implications

A tad obvious, perhaps. But how should this affect employee activism and companies’ responses to it?  

For workers, try to avoid top-first organising, where a small number of workers decide on asks of management, and then call on their colleagues to support these pre-determined demands.

Instead, consult widely with colleagues on what their priorities are, and gain an understanding of their stance on the issue that motivated your organising in the first place. Are they supportive, neutral, or opposed?

Seek to institutionalise your organising efforts, whether that be through a trade union, some form of workers’ council, or something else. Make democratic governance of the employee body a feature of whichever route you choose.

Don’t go public prematurely. A small group going to the media with their concerns may generate some headlines and cause a temporary PR headache, but is unlikely to lead to lasting change alone, and heightens the risk of retaliation against leading organisers.

All of the above takes longer, but will result in greater and more durable worker power and thus a greater ability to see employee preferences put into practice. Without it, you risk being dismissed as an unrepresentative minority, or seeing another set of employees contradict your demands, allowing management to simply align themselves with the employee group that best represents their own preferences.

Of course, all of this is not going to be possible or desirable in every workplace “campaign”, in which case the simple tips are: choose an issue which is likely to unify rather than one which is highly partisan; get a sense-check on your letter, petition, etc., via 1-on-1 conversations with a range of staff and informal surveys if possible; get as many numbers on your side as you can!

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For companies, seek employee views proactively rather than as a kneejerk response to a controversial incident. It will lead to less heated exchanges and an environment where workers are more prepared to share their views. It might feel like opening pandora’s box, but if your employees favour a course of action different to you, that’s information you need to know. A company will struggle to deliver on its goals if its workers aren’t behind it.

Partially driven by the increasing urgency of making headway on these problems, society increasingly expects that the private sector must contribute to solutions.1 The news is dominated by stories of greenwashing, of weak commitments to net zero pledges, of the emptiness of vague statements committing to treat company stakeholders better. While frustrating, it’s easy to miss that the very fact that private companies feel obligated to expend so much time and energy portraying themselves as good corporate citizens is a pretty significant shift. Up until fairly recently, the dominant narrative has been that companies’ responsibilities begin and end with making a profit for their shareholders.

Arguably, then, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift – from one where companies are expected to play by the rules of the game and little more, to one where they are expected to make some contribution to achieving globally agreed goals like the Paris Agreement or the Sustainable Development Goals. Paradigm shmaradigm you might say, but society’s rules and behaviours all flow from the paradigm of how we collectively think the world should operate. According to acclaimed systems thinker Donella Meadows, changing mindsets or paradigms is the second most influential intervention that can be made in a complex system.

Of course, we are some way from that high-level shift being reflected in the every day behaviour of companies. The shift is being driven by demands from a range of stakeholders – consumers, investors, employees, politicians. But current executive teams’ mindsets and incentives remain aligned with the old paradigm. So while they will signal commitment to their new societal obligations of ethics and sustainability, they will resist as long as they possibly can.

That resistance includes retaliating against the stakeholders pressuring them, when they can get away with it. The customer is king, so they are safe enough. Shareholders have primacy, so they too are safe from direct retaliation (companies instead have been lobbying policymakers to reduce investor interference on sustainability or “ESG” issues).

Workers, however, have not been so lucky. Labour protections in many countries are extremely weak, and the extent to which such protections cover concerns that go beyond pay and conditions (such as those related to an employer’s climate strategy) is unclear. As a result, many pioneering employee activists at the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Kickstarter have experienced retaliation of one form or another – generally leading to them parting ways with their employer.

What will tomorrow bring?

It is for this reason that the decision to begin engaging in workplace advocacy needs to be taken with great care, with the knowledge that getting fired or otherwise forced out of a job is a real possibility (though approaching change in the right way can vastly diminish that risk).

Such advocacy seems a thankless task, for now. Will it always be that way?

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Let’s fast forward 10 years. I believe that the new2 paradigm that companies have broad obligations to society is here to stay. We have a deadline of 2030 to achieve the SDGs and to halve global emissions. I believe we will miss those targets, but like a university student or newsletter writer prone to procrastination, we will start to get our act together as the deadline looms nearer. Massive incentive packages such as the U.S.’ Inflation Reduction Act will become widespread. Environmentally-damaging activities such as running coal plants or producing diesel cars will be phased out across much of the world.

In such a world, success in solving sustainability challenges will in many sectors be the determiner of the profitability and survival of companies. We’ll need a new generation of leaders at the top of these companies. Competition for such positions will be as tough as it ever has been. What will determine who gets picked?

I suggest that the employee activists of today will have positioned themselves well for top roles in the world of tomorrow. They will have demonstrated that they were ahead of the curve in identifying how companies needed to evolve. They will have built depth of knowledge of the challenges faced. They will have shown their passion in solving these issues is authentic. They will have taken risks. They will have won colleagues and others to their side. All of these are traits you want in leaders.

Those working directly on sustainability teams today will be particularly well-placed to lead. But command of social and environmental issues will be essential across the business, be it in HR, procurement, regulatory affairs or legal departments. So particularly for workers not in sustainability-themed jobs, demonstrating your passion on these issues today will truly set you apart from the crowd tomorrow.

If sustainability is in our future – and, for all of our sakes, it damn well better be – then those that champion it today may well lead us to it tomorrow.

New year, samesletter.

The idea for Honest Work first came to me in 2019, inspired in no small part by a wave of employee activism then taking place, particularly in the US tech industry. Workers were defying the common idea that they care only about good working conditions, and were challenging their companies’ work with US immigration services, their political donations, their contributions to online misinformation and censorship. Of all the campaigns, perhaps the most successful were those focused on climate change: workers at Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon sent letters, joined the climate strikes and (at Amazon) even filed a shareholder proposal. All three companies subsequently made commitments to achieve net zero emissions, with Microsoft going as far as to pledge net negative emissions by 2030.

Despite recent layoffs, workers at big tech companies are among the most privileged in the world, with high salaries, amazing perks and a long list of job opportunities available to them if their current employment relationship comes to an end. As such, it is tempting to view such workplace advocacy as the exclusive domain of those with comfy jobs and their material needs taken care of. It’s all very well for them…

Such a view is not baseless; raising significant challenges to the impact an employer is having on the world may be too risky for many. Yet the employee activism we’ve been seeing on non-workplace issues is just the latest in a long history of workers standing up for what they believe in. Often, the risks have been high.1

1862: The British working class against American slavery

The earliest example I have found of “employee activism” for the common good is a powerful one.2 During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s forces blockaded the southern states from exporting their slave-picked cotton, which was the source of the vast majority of cotton for the mills of Lancashire in the UK. Without it, mills were closed and thousands of workers faced unemployment, starvation and destitution.

Shipping companies and mill owners were clamouring for the UK’s Royal Navy to smash Lincoln’s blockade and enable the Confederacy to export. Workers and trade unions, however, held a number of meetings to support the northern states and the blockade. On New Year’s Eve of 1862, a meeting of cotton workers and others in Manchester passed a motion in support of the blockade and the fight for the abolition of slavery – despite the immense hardship it was causing them.

Liberal MP John Bright told a mass meeting of trade unionists:

1930s: Dockworkers against fascism

Before the commencement of World War II in 1939 the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan had already invaded multiple countries and committed numerous atrocities. Workers in other countries at times refused to engage in labour that could in any way support the Axis’ aggression.

In the aftermath of the Nanjing Massacre, a mass murder of Chinese civilians by Japanese forces, the Australian Council of Trade Unions called for an embargo on the export of iron to Japan. This led to workers at ports around Australia refusing to load any ships bound for Japan, and culminated in the Dalfram dispute, where workers in New South Wales walked off the job and went on strike for over 10 weeks, refusing to load a ship with pig iron for Japan. In South Africa, workers refused to load meat on a ship destined for the Italian army that had recently invaded Ethiopia.

Dockworkers around the world continue to engage in such acts of international solidarity, more recently refusing to unload Israeli goods following a bombardment of Palestine, and arms destined for Zimbabwe following a bout of state-sponsored violence.

1970s: Australia’s green bans

In the late 1960s Australia saw a wave of development, which led to concerns among communities that their local area and environment would be damaged. Concerned communities brought their concerns to trade unions in the construction industry, who often stood in solidarity with residents and began to refuse construction projects, on the basis that “workers have a right to insist their labour not be used in harmful ways”.

The decade saw union workers institute a number of “green bans”, refusing building projects that would reduce accessibility to green spaces for working people, or otherwise damage neighbourhoods. When a company seeking to erect a luxury housing development threatened to use non-union labour, workers on a separate project for the company threatened to abandon that development too if they did so, and the company relented.

Secretary of the Builders Labourers Federation Jack Mundey askd:

There was even a “pink ban”, with union workers refusing to do further building work for Macquarie University after they expelled a student for being gay.

1960s to 80s: Boycotting apartheid South Africa

The treatment of black people in South Africa mobilised workers from various industries around the world to challenge the role their companies were playing in enabling that racist regime.

Workers at Polaroid and IBM protested their employers’ work with the South African government, and circulated flyers to coworkers and shareholders. On multiple occasions dockworkers refused to unload ships containing South African cargo. And in my native Ireland, a staff member at retailer Dunnes Stores was suspended for following a union instruction not to handle goods from apartheid South Africa. This led to 12 young workers going on a strike that would last for 3 years.

2010s and 2020s: Across locations, industries, issues

While it may be partly because of information being more readily available, employee activism on ethical, non-workplace issues appears to have become much more widespread in recent years.

2018 and 2019 saw the biggest jumps in such incidents, mainly driven by efforts by tech workers seeking to prevent their employers from working with the US military and immigration agencies. But the industries where this has been happening and the issues at stake have only grown. Workers have pushed their companies to have more positive racial impacts following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Insurance workers, yoga clothing ambassadors, consultants and PR professionals have been pressuring their employers to do better on their unique contributions to the climate crisis.  Workers have been holding internal debates, writing petitions, posting on social media and even creating websites in their efforts to push for change.

Some takeaways

What does this rapid history lesson tell us?

• Employees have sometimes stood alone for what was right. At several important historical moments, business owners were happy to profit from situations we would now consider morally repugnant. It was employees who were led by their conscience, and fought to do the right thing.

• Employee activism doesn’t have to be the domain of the privileged. Blue-collar workers have been in the vanguard of activism on ethical issues. While it’s natural that wealthier, more secure workers are prepared to take bigger risks, all can contribute in some way to building better companies.

• Unions have often been indispensable in building solidarity between communities. Today, trade/labour unions’ membership has shrunk, and they rarely include “ethical” concerns like climate change in negotiations with companies. We need more unions taking these issues more seriously3, and to support other forms of worker organising to enable them to advocate on these non-traditional issues that they nonetheless care about.

Next steps

When we hear about people in the past standing up for what is right, there can be a tendency to assume we would have done the same. That we would have recognised these historical injustices for what they were, despite the fact that at the time they were widely accepted as inevitable and the way things were. That we would have raised our head above the parapet despite the risks, the discomfort, the social shunning that we would face.

I think we overestimate ourselves. There are many things that we widely tolerate today that future generations may judge as horrific as we view the likes of slavery and apartheid today. Supply chains with awful working conditions to allow us to buy cheaper clothes. The treatment of animals in factory farms. Individually and collectively continuing to emit high levels of carbon knowing that it will be the poor who pay. We may dislike these things, but our inaction allows them to continue.

ACTION: Consider what your own ethical “red lines” might be. What problems, local or global, do you want to avoid contributing to at all costs? Write them down, and make a commitment to yourself to tackle them wherever they intersect with your life - as employee, consumer, citizen. Do a bit of digging to see if they do in fact touch your life somehow, especially in the workplace. Is there something you can do about it?

Finally… Last month in employee activism:

Employees at Neuralink, the medical device company owned by Elon Musk, have been lodging internal complaints about the company’s approach to animal testing, arguing that Musk’s demands to speed up research have led to many more animals being killed after experiments than would otherwise be the case.

Last month, the inaugural newsletter argued that the workplace is one of the most underutilised areas where people seeking to push for positive real-world change can make a difference. If you decide you want your work to have an impact, the next obvious question is: what’s the right job for you?

Conventional wisdom: Ditch the laggards, find a leader

As awareness of the climate crisis and the broader ills facing the world grows, so too are the number of people prepared to up sticks for more ethical employers. 41% of Gen Y workers in Australia and 49% in US would quit their jobs if it became clear their employer’s values did not align with their own. Many have already done so, some in dramatic fashion – see the Shell consultant whose open letter and video ending her business relationship with the company due to their environmental harms went viral.

It’s not just existing employees walking away; there are increasing efforts to stop “bad” companies from recruiting bright-eyed graduates in the first place. Law Students for Climate Accountability have developed an index assessing law firms’ performance on climate, encouraging their peers to shun poor performers. Across the UK, students and staff are campaigning for an end to recruitment relationships between universities and the oil, gas, and mining industries. Such efforts have the support of none other than UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who has himself called on graduates to shun “climate wreckers”.

A job market where more workers are aware of and weigh the ethics and sustainability of employers may deprive bad companies of the talent they need to thrive. It will also improve the talent pool available to sustainability leaders and disruptive startups, giving them an edge over competitors.

Another idea: Push your company from laggard to(wards) leader

There is however another version of that story. Bad companies may see their access to top talent reduced, but not eliminated.1 It is a hindrance, but not an existential threat. Meanwhile, those companies become less likely to improve, as the employees that might have pioneered change there now work elsewhere. A vicious cycle entrenching the status quo ensues.2

Of course, such companies may find themselves disrupted by a competitor and be forced to change or fail: see Tesla forcing other automakers to invest in electric vehicles. However, these dynamics will not replicate in all industries or for all issues. Across several issues – such as plastic pollution or human rights abuses – a few bad apples can still cause massive negative impacts. Having ethical alternatives is not enough; incumbents’ practices must change.

So if you work3 for an established company which might be contributing to some of the problem’s society is facing, don’t be so quick to look for the exit. Working for a more ethical company may feel better, but there is no shortage of competition for those jobs; if they don’t hire you, they’ll hire someone else. And if you quit, your company will replace you, probably with someone more indifferent to their negative impacts.

As noted in the previous newsletter, employees successfully pushing their company to be more ethical is far from unprecedented. Workers at Amazon got the company to commit to achieving net zero emission; lawyers got their firms to withdraw from Donald Trump’s lawsuits challenging the validity of the 2020 US presidential election. These successes depend on having like-minded colleagues prepared to support change.

The fact is we need both – workers taking up jobs at sustainability leaders and startups, making them better; and employees at traditional companies coming together and pushing for change from within. But it is the latter where we are significantly undersupplied.

Staying or going: The pros and cons

So: we need more values-driven employees within established companies pushing for them to improve their practices and have a more positive impact on the world. At the same time, that’s a gruelling path and is not going to be suitable for everyone. How to decide what’s right for you?

Here’s a rundown of some of the main considerations.

You: Advocate v Agreeable

By its nature, changing a company culture or practices requires a willingness to speak up, to have difficult and sometimes heated conversations, to be perceived by some as an antagonist, to suffer setbacks.

Some people relish this, while others may be prepared to tolerate it as necessary for making a change.4 For others, the prospect of having to fight to get agreement on what they consider to be basic decency may seem exhausting and disheartening. Such people are likely to be more energised and effective working for a company of like-minded people who are already on the same page about the goals they are pursuing.

You: Steadfast v Adaptable

We tend to overestimate the extent to which we are influenced by the environments in which we work and live – the assumptions, the ideologies, rules and etiquette. Your lens on what is possible, what is appropriate, what options on the table: all of this may narrow from your continued exposure to a particular vision in your workplace. I’m reminded of a scene from the film Law Abiding Citizen:

Be conscious, then, that influence flows both ways. That said, those who can hang onto their idealism and are able to marry it with a deepened knowledge of a company can have an impact no one else can – marrying an activist’s commitment to principles with an insider’s understanding of their company’s goals, circumstances, challenges.

You: Level of risk tolerance

Workplace organising is a risky business, and organising around ethical issues is the least protected of all. How indispensable are you to your employer? How would you cope with a sudden loss of livelihood, or impeded promotion opportunities, if your employer was to retaliate? Are there alternative employment options available to you? Depending on your company, leading internal advocacy efforts requires a minimum level of tolerance for risk.

Company: Open v closed

Companies tend to sit on a spectrum between those that encourage staff at all levels to share ideas and challenge conventional wisdom, and those that have a very top-down culture where staff’s role is to implement the vision of the company’s leaders, not critique it.

In the former there are likely to be more forums for expressing dissenting views, understanding whether such views are widely shared and building momentum for change. In the latter, there is a greater likelihood of retaliation against organising efforts by workers. This is not necessarily a reason to abandon such efforts, but does call for a higher level of risk tolerance and the use of more clandestine organising tactics.

Company: Incremental v dramatic change

It is one thing for employees to push a consulting company to restrict the work it does with fossil fuel company clients; it is quite another to push the fossil fuel company to do a 180 on its business model and shift immediately to renewable energy. There must be a reasonable, profitable path to a company adhering to employee demands if they are to have any hope of being successful. This does not mean that employee advocacy within a fossil fuel company is futile, just that its goals need to be achievable: accelerating investments in renewable energy, eliminating new exploration, addressing bad lobbying practices.

If there is not a reasonably achievable degree of progress that is compatible with your values, then finding a more values-aligned company is probably your best move.

Company: Convertible v opposed colleagues

No matter how determined or right you may be, you will never achieve change alone; winning over an appreciable number of colleagues is essential. Do at least some colleagues share your view on the problem facing your company, or can they be convinced? Don’t be discouraged if your immediate circle is not on the same page; green teams, employee resource groups and staff committees can also be a source of potential collaborators. But again, if the change you are seeking runs directly counter to the company’s raison d’etre, don’t be surprised if allies are few and far between. After all, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”5

Next steps

The above is a fairly simple way of thinking about the kind of workplace where you’re best suited to making an impact. We need to change the norm of “good people should go work for good companies”; the world desperately needs more workers stepping up to challenge the practices of the companies where they work. However, for many people this is not where they’ll be most effective, and such people should take their talents to companies prepared to put them to good use for the world.

The holidays and the beginning of a new year are a good time for reflecting on our role in the world, so this month’s action:

ACTION: Have a long think about how you can be most additional through your work. Can you see yourself as someone winning colleagues to your cause, contributing to a movement to change a company from within? Or is your specialty finding solutions with like-minded people who have already agreed a shared goal? Then, whichever camp you find yourself in, the follow-up question: how compatible is your current workplace (or career path) with the worker you want to be? Is there a company out there where your unique value-add could have a greater impact?

Let me know what you conclude!

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Reminder: Last month’s action

ACTION #1: Share this newsletter with one friend or colleague. Maybe it’s someone passionate about having a positive impact. Maybe a colleague in a position of influence. Maybe one of those people who are just annoyingly impressive at getting things done. Pick someone with whom you can talk about your goals and struggles, and you can hold each other accountable. Maybe share it with multiple people, form a little group of changemakers embarking on a journey together. Because change can start with one but requires many.

Share Honest Work

It’s entering your inbox while climate change is having its annual fortnight in the spotlight, courtesy of the COP27 international climate conference. It’s a time for watching political leaders you may or may not have voted for make speeches, maybe some incremental progress, but the significant action we need generally fails to materialise.

At times like these it’s hard not to feel powerless. Most people in most of the world support stronger climate action, and have done so for years. Yet the will of the people breaks like a wave against the unflinching wall of inertia, and limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees gets ever further out of reach.

Times like these can be a good opportunity to reflect on what tools you, reader, have at your disposal to make a positive change in the world. How can you be your most impactful for the issue(s) you care most about?

Volunteer work or charitable donations are very direct ways to make a positive contribution. They are tangible, your contribution is measurable, they are ways to live up to your values to the extent your busy life allows. The downside is that they can rarely be more than a small part of the time and/or money that you spend, and your impact there may be outweighed by your other impacts through your participation in economic life, which may reinforce existing systems and structures.

Your consumer choices are another path to impact, with apps to help you align your purchasing power with your ethical beliefs. Companies are responsive to economic incentives, and so consumer pressure or boycotts en masse can be very influential. However, we make so many buying decisions every day, across a range of goods and services (your food, your clothes, your bloody pension!), potentially touching so many different issues (worker rights, deforestation, recyclable packaging, occupied territories…), and your individual purchasing decisions count for a negligible amount of the sellers’ revenues. It can be hard to find the time or motivation to do your due diligence on every purchase, and pay the premium often involved.

And then there’s your participation in Politics. Voting is part of your civic duty, but is infrequent and involves a choice between predetermined options. Ensuring those options are actually good enough requires more active participation: becoming a member of a political party, getting involved in local organising, joining a protest movement. As politics shapes the rules of the games that we all play, here the fruits of victory are largest. The downsides are that the chances of impact as one citizen among millions are also lowest, and will require enormous amounts of your time to have any shot, which is challenging if you have a full-time job.

By and large, that is the totality of tools most people think they have in their toolbox. All have their strengths and weaknesses. All have inherent value irrespective of impact. And pretty much all seem to exist in a realm separate to our day-to-day life, so we try to squeeze in what we can around our obligations to work, family, friends, exercise, etc.

Work

Most people are workers. The (physical or virtual) workplace is where we spend the largest chunk of our working life. It’s where we have an informational advantage – you probably know more about your company and what it does than non-colleagues. It’s also where we have a voice advantage – you are probably a higher proportion of your company’s workforce than you are of any company’s customers, or your constituency’s registered voters.

Your voice is rarely louder than when you speak up as an employee.

Whistleblowers are perhaps the biggest example of this. Former Facebook employees Sophie Zhang and Frances Haugen shined a light on how the social media network was being used to undermine elections around the world and damaging teens’ mental health. An ex-PwC auditor helped reveal the massive scale of tax avoidance practiced by many multinational companies. An ex-Uber lobbyist showed the company’s role in violating or hollowing out workers’ rights around the world. More than one investor has seen their head of sustainability call out hypocrisy and greenwashing on their way out the door.

Not all employee activism has to involve a dramatic departure or acting alone; some of the most impactful actions have been groups of employees working to change their companies from within. Workers using everything from sign-on letters to walkouts to internal debates got Microsoft to commit to net negative emissions by 2030, got Walmart to stop selling certain weapons, got PR company Edelman to stop whitewashing the reputation of a private prisons client.

Pushing for change as a worker faces challenges just as it does in any other capacity, number one being the risk to your livelihood. We’ll explore this in future newsletters. None of the above is to say employee activism is the best tool for everyone, or even most people, to make a change. But of all tools it may be the most underused, and massive progress is possible if more workers learn to wield it.

Honest Work

The idea that our workplace is a largely untapped arena for positive impact – and the inspiration offered by worker success stories – is what motivated the founding of Honest Work.

Finding a job that allows us to have the impact we want is hard. Tech workers who signed up to connect the world find themselves contributing to its division. Pharma workers who wanted to help create life-saving medicines end up at companies whose aggressive drug pricing keep it out of the hands of those who need it. ESG staff find themselves limited by superiors with low ambition. The mission of Honest Work: help as many workers as possible bridge that gap between desire and impact.

We’re planning to do this in a few ways:

• Information: our website has a run-down of some of the biggest issues we collectively face today, research ranking how different companies (maybe yours!) are contributing to problems and solutions, and what changes you can ask from your company[1]

• Tips: do you know what you want to change but no idea how? We have a basic step-by-step guide on how to go about advocating in your workplace.

• Community: over time, build an online network of worker activists, who can connect within and across companies and sectors, share advice and support each other

And of course, this newsletter, once a month. You’ll get a rundown of employee activism on ethical and sustainability issues over the previous month, opportunities to get involved, links to new resources, analysis of big questions.

Don’t just read; Act

While this newsletter and project hopes to inform, the goal is to trigger action. Consuming news, watching a hard-hitting documentary, sharing hot takes on social media; all this can feel like doing something but has little effect.

Don’t you dare read this newsletter and then go about your day as you would have anyway. Each month there will be one task for you to do. Your first task is below; it’s an easy one to get started, and slightly self-serving, but it should help us both.

ACTION: Share this newsletter with one friend or colleague. Maybe it’s someone passionate about having a positive impact. Maybe a colleague in a position of influence. Maybe one of those people who are just annoyingly impressive at getting things done. Pick someone with whom you can talk about your goals and struggles, and you can hold each other accountable. Maybe share it with multiple people, form a little group of changemakers embarking on a journey together. Because change can start with one but requires many.

See you next month.

[1] More will be added over time. Want to contribute? Get in touch!