WeWork announced that they would no longer have meat at company events and that if you submit a receipt for a hamburger purchased while on company travel, you won’t be reimbursed. The goal is to lower WeWork’s carbon footprint.
A noble goal, for sure. But, I’m not sure they’ve thought through the consequences of this decision. Only 3.3 percent of Americans are vegetarians or vegans, which means the meat ban will likely come across to employees as a negative rather than a positive. (It looks like fish is acceptable, so it’s not a strict vegetarian policy.)
The difficulty of such a policy.
Having only vegetarian catered company events is easy. Whoever does the ordering chooses the menu and that shouldn’t be too problematic. What is more problematic is that they will no longer reimburse meat as part of travel expenses.
Imagine you’re the person in charge of travel reimbursement. You now have to scour receipts to make sure someone didn’t get chicken on those nachos. And what if an employee takes a client or a job candidate out to eat? Is the employee required to say to the client (or job candidate), “Hey, you can’t order that spaghetti Bolognese. No meat!” Because that won’t go over well.
To keep reading, click here: Traveling for Business? WeWork Will Only Reimburse Your Meals if They are Vegetarian
Sounds like “Big Government” watching over you. I eat healthy but I include meat, especially a good hamburger once in a while. WeWork can do what they want in the office, but outside, within budget, “hands off”.
Government is not involved at all. WeWork is a private company, operating in an area not regulated by government.
You and your facts.
This feels like the way hotels ask you to minimize towel use, and pretend that it’s about being kind to the planet rather than saving them a truckload of money. (my bet is that a good number of folks are going to eat what they want most of the time and just skip submitting expenses, or submit and risk not getting reimbursed)
Even if they really wanted their people to help “lower their carbon footprint” by eating less meat, they’d probably have better results incentivizing vegetarian meals rather than penalizing hamburgers. But that might cost them money, and they clearly don’t care about the environment THAT much.
Pretending that individual action matters compared to corporate impacts is class warfare. The carbon footprint of WeWork’s CEO is likely far larger than any amount saved by insisting employees not consume meat at reimbursed meals.
Reminds me of Al Gore literally people to shiver in the dark, taking cold showers, while spending $30,000 per month for electricity for his mansion.
Right?!? Or doing his environmental talks around the country. Traveling on a private jet each time.
This may be the dumbest thing I read about all week. I hope the C-suite staff are not wearing leather shoes or driving fossil fuel cars with leather interiors. Better yet, maybe their long-term health insurance rates will increase when their works have to opt into eating ice cream, nachos and power bars when they lack any vegetarian meal options during travel.
It’s only the second dumbest thing to me. Starbucks and their crusade against plastic straws to save the oceans (while replacing them with sippy cup lids that use even *more* plastic) is dumber.
But it’s all the same sort of empty PR stunt, conducted in the belief that people are gullible enough to believe you care if you just fake it hard enough. (Sadly, for the most part, they are correct.)
An individual’s diet is one of the most personal choices he can make, and is nobody’s business but his own. What’s next? A rule that you have to limit your sex life to what the boss’s church thinks is OK?
We really need a general, nationwide “Employers, mind your own (bleeping) business” law, backed up by stiff penalties. Of course like most discrimination laws this will be impossible to enforce unless we take away employers’ right to choose their employees as Germany has done.
Their policy makes the assumption that meat is unhealthy. This is a false assertion on many levels but it fits nicely into a PC PR stunt. Crusading at work at the expense of common sense makes them look stupid.
So glad that they are willing to make this public – I now know who to avoid doing business with.