Shopify Is ‘Not The Government’: Largest Company In Canada Lays The Smackdown On Woke Employees

Shopify, the largest publicly-traded company in Canada, laid down the law about employees demanding “woke” corporate virtue signaling, issuing a fiery memo reminding employees that they were there to sell products, and that anyone who was focused on other things during the day should not expect to keep their job.

The ecommerce platform has indulged in the culture wars, notoriously removing Donald Trump paraphernalia from its stores in January. But even before then, CEO Tobi Lütke seemed to realize he had created a Frankenstein’s monster, reaching his breaking point when hysterical employees claimed that an “emoticon” picturing string reminded them of a digital noose.

In a memo written last August but obtained by Business Insider this month, Lütke wrote:

A good start would be to remind everyone that we are a business… Everything Shopify does is to accomplish this, and everyone at Shopify should be able to describe how their job, through a series of direct or indirect steps, furthers this mission.

To help you make this more clear to your team members, here are some pointers about what Shopify is not:

Shopify, like any other for-profit company, is not a family. The very idea is preposterous… The dangers of “family thinking” are that it becomes incredibly hard to let poor performers go. …

Shopify is also not the government. We cannot solve every societal problem here. We are part of an ecosystem, of economies, of culture, and of actual countries. We also can’t take care of all your needs. We will try our best to take care of the ones that ensure you can support our mission. Shopify’s worldview is well documented — we believe in liberal values and equality of opportunity. Sometimes we see opportunities to help nudge these causes forward. We do this because this directly helps our business and our merchants and not because of some moralistic overreach.

We want to build one of the best companies in the world. We obsess about our merchants. We want everyone to have a shot at bettering their lot through entrepreneurship. We want to make and keep Shopify, the product, world class or die trying. …

Everyone that engages in endless Slack trolling, victimhood thinking, us-vs-them divisiveness, and zero sum thinking must be seen for the threat they are: they break teams. Teams survive and thrive on the actions of the collective, and the cohesiveness of the whole. Poor performance and divisiveness cannot be tolerated.

If this sounds at all surprising, this is because we somehow lost something… I feel that a lot of these core beliefs have been muddied over recent years… Currently we are successful despite the muddying. This will not work for much longer. Let’s get back there.

He concluded: “You might be tempted to take what’s up there and run it through some kind of lowpass filter and translate it into your own language before discussing it with your peers and your leads. Don’t. Above is what I need everyone to understand.”

The move was precipitated when employees on an internal Slack chatroom focused on social justice objected to an emoticon of rope that they found stored in the chat software’s gallery.

“It’s obviously a symbol of lynching for Black communities, so to see that as a Black employee is just really triggering and really difficult,” a former employee told Business Insider.

The company said it was merely part of a collection of stock images, part of a collection of icons depicting knots.

Lütke shut down commenting in the chat room, writing:

I’ve been on the Internet for 25 years now and sadly I’ve seen what’s happening here hundreds of times: open and unmoderated forums can turn into echo chambers and those end up with extreme toxicity… I’m deeply disappointed that this is your interpretation of belonging at Shopify. We appear to have forgotten that humans (colleagues!) are on the other side of our messages. …

Shopify is fully committed to the ideas of equality of opportunity and belonging. There is some valid feedback here that should have been given in good faith directly to the teams. Unfortunately most of it is lost in the fundamentalism that has emerged.

Employees in the chat room scoffed at their boss, clicking negative emoticons to signal their displeasure.

Months prior, Shopify had pledged that it would donate money to causes such as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. But Shopify employees used the company’s history of wokeness against it, with one former employee huffing to Business Insider about the noose incident: “You just told us you were willing to listen to Black people about this when they brought their concerns. You said that you wanted to do that as a company, and this is the response.”

Last month, Basecamp CEO Jason Fried issued a similar edict, demanding “no more societal and political discussions” on company time, calling it “a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places.”

“We don’t have to solve deep social problems, chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day, or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure. These are all important topics, but they’re not our topics at work — they’re not what we collectively do here,” he wrote.

But like Shopify, it later appeared to relapse. Under pressure from woke employees, Basecamp suspended a senior employee who doubted that the company was systemically racist.

Shopify is a far larger company, with 7,000 employees and contractors.

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