We’re living in a climate emergency and today is the Global Climate Strike, where people in over 150 countries will be stepping up to support young climate strikers and demanding an end to the age of fossil fuels. Because this is an extinction-level threat to our existence, Reason Digital is supporting the strike by closing its website today and letting staff take paid time off to join the protests in Manchester.
People have said “isn’t letting people take time off defeating the object of a strike?” but I believe the branding of this event as a “strike” suggests employers will be unsupportive and that employees will need to take drastic action to take part, potentially causing confontational situations between the wrong parties. Instead, we need to be angry with our governments and the big institutions that have the biggest impact on our environment.
Additionally, since there is no “right to strike” under UK law, striking is technically a breach of contract and employers are not obliged to pay anyone who doesn’t turn up to work. Again, this situation is unecessarily confrontational and unsupportive.
As an employer supporting this cause, we want to make it as easy as possible for members of our team to support their chosen causes and today’s Global Climate Strike is one way to highlight our current situation, the strenth of feeling and the need for change.
We support Manchester’s ambition to be Carbon Neutral by 2038 and are always working on making improvements to our working practices. We don’t take on projects from fossil fuel companies, we’ll be disclosing our turnover from high carbon clients by the end of the year. Most of our clients’ websites are already hosted in energy-efficient server farms serving pages faster and running on renewable energy but there’s always more we can do to reduce the carbon footprint of our websites as well as in and around the office and in our local environment. We’ll be posting about these improvements over time.
Please spend a few minutes reading this article about why Reason Digital is supporting the Global Climate Strike and what we’re already doing to try to reduce our environmental impact as a business. It’s posted on Medium because you can’t read about it on our website today.
If you want to join the movement, find and join your local protest and follow the action on Twitter.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.