Basecamp is known to have one of the most generous pay/benefits packages in the industry. Generous to the point where I would have no idea what a union would even bargain for. I would highly doubt that this was in response to any effort to unionize.
Stock wouldn't make a lot of sense for Basecamp though, unless they started paying dividends or something. They aren't public and have no indication that they ever have any desire to be public, and the ownership of the company is small enough that I'd be very surprised if any ownership stake didn't come with a lot of conditions on how that ownership could be transfered. As a liquid asset, Basecamp stock probably isn't particularly valuable.
They said they'd split part of the sale proceeds, should it ever happen, with all the employees. There's no way the expected value from that would measure up to years of Amazon RSUs. But then, that's the case for almost every other company attempting to pay top of market.
"There are no plans to sell Basecamp or take the company public! But, in the slight chance of that happening, employees may be eligible to receive a portion of 10% of the value of the company if Basecamp is sold or made public. That 10% would be divided into shares, and shares distributed amongst employees based on their tenure at the time of the sale/offering."
Looks like the answer is "yes": a full one-third of Basecamp employees wanted to join the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion council. DEI appears to be precisely the politics DHH and Jason don't want Basecamp to think about.
That’s usually a nice side-effect. This is a bigger trend developing in tech, I think ... the exact contours of why various C-levels are pushing this now is yet to be seen (not every company policy change to this effect was announced on a blog post, it’s happening elsewhere too).
I honestly think people are reading too much into this. They straight out say that discussions were turning toxic. That presumably impacted the ability of teams to be productive in the jobs they were paid to do. That's the why.
From what I see, lots of people who object to this policy change raised a (legitimate) concern: where is the evidence supporting the claim? It’s not like corporations have ever had any problem firing people over productivity issues. If people argue over political topics all day at work and that turns out to affect their productivity negatively, it’s much less controversial for the company to act upon it from a performance angle.
