> Calling your climate change denying coworker a backwards dumb-ass is not illegal. You can of course be fired for that inappropriate behavior, but it isn't illegal.
A correct statement, but one that skirts around the issue at hand: in this situation the people berating their evangelical coworker are creating a hostile workplace environment and the company is obligated to take actions to remidiate this situation. If the climate denier points out this hostile workplace behavior, they're not censoring any particular view. Only the hostile actions of their co-worker.
While Weiss' high profile position makes it much more likely to receive public scrutiny, she is indeed entitled to the same workplace protections as a mid level software developer. Working as a columnist doesn't absolve a company of their legal responsibility to curb workplace harassment. Your workplace is a captive audience. What is legal for some random person to say to you is not at all the same standard that is applied to co-workers. Weiss calling this behavior out as discrimination is not calling any particular belief illegal, only the treatment towards her by her coworkers.
> Calling your climate change denying coworker a backwards dumb-ass is not illegal
Illegal is when you call the police. There's lots of behaviors that the employer is better to prevent before you have to call the police. If it rose to the level of illegal, there's a lot of things that already went wrong.
> Weiss specifically called out this behavior as unlawful discrimination.
If she was uniquely subjected to harassing and hostile behavior then it's discrimination, by definition. If that treatment is routine for anyone that dares to voice an unorthodox though in NYT, then it's not discrimination - it's just deeply sick and broken culture.
>
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
> There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong
I don't think this is referring to curbing any specific opinion or view, but rather her co-workers' interactions with her.
Its entirely appropriate to speak out against, say, the pervasive denial of climate change among evangelicals. That said if you have an evangelical coworker that doesn't believe in climate change, you will still be met with repercussions if you go around calling said co-worker a backwards dumbass and repeatedly post ax emojis next to their name in slack.
> You absolutely have a right not to be outraged or offended by someone's opinion at your place of employment if you work for a company with any sense.
What?
Harassment is different and can be objectively defined in the scope of the business and/or role.
But outrage/offense is subjective. You can change your views from one day to the next, or flip perspectives over lunch. You don't get to come back from lunch with a new view, and have a 'right not to be offended'.
> "Oh, you have an unwed live-in partner? You are a danger to society and cannot be allowed to work here."
The employee's action doesn't create a hostile work environment.
> "Oh, you uploaded pics of yourself at a gay club. Sorry, that kind of depravity has no place at a Christian company."
The employee's action doesn't create a hostile work environment. The employer's reaction did, though.
> "I see you Liked BLM, and not the outdoorsy wilderness BLM. You must be a criminal rioter, we can't let you work here."
The employee's action doesn't create a hostile work environment. If a video of the employee showing them throwing molotov cocktails at police or storming the US Capitol goes viral, you could reasonably argue that their actions reflect poorly on you, their employer, but you can't discriminate against them for having a positive opinion of BLM.
> What someone does legally, without harming or threatening anyone else, in their private life outside of their job, should have little to zero impact on their ability to maintain employment.
Except this has always been the case. What you do outside your work has always affected your ability to maintain employment. The difference is that now those who benefited from this in the past are now suffering from it.
> She was clearly targeted, ostracized, and fired for speaking her mind.
No, this is literally not what happened. I can point to numerous cases of people speaking their mind without suffering from repercussions.
Pretending this was about someone "speaking their mind" ignores the reality and nuances of what is actually happening.
> These hypothetical people are getting fired because their words cause real harm to people.
These people are not hypothetical and the statement is dehumanization. If you punch a coworker they will have a damage that could be measured and reported. On the other side you won't be able to measure how offended someone is (unless it goes against the law). Cancelling people for having their own ideas even if they are different from what is conventional transforms into a witch hunt for a "greater good".
> If someone is expressing political or even religious views that are so extreme that they create a hostile work environment, I don't see an issue with firing them over it.
There is a process, and step one in that process is asking them to please stop sharing their views in the workplace.
Expressing extremely wrong views can't be the standard for creating a hostile work environment because people are wrong about a bunch of stuff and the only way to figure that out is to express the view and be told why it is wrong.
Particularly in the Damore case, the standard shouldn't be how a third party feels. There is a long history of seeing how that standard plays out, it'll end up hurting minority voices. The standard needs to be how a first party responds when asked to do something.
> "it doesn't matter if he's right, it's illegal to talk about it."
I never said it was illegal. I said it was stupid to do it at work. There's a lot of things that while not illegal, are stupid to do at work and will get you fired.
> his opinions were nowhere near that extreme and are basically just "women have statistically different interests than men." He never said the women in tech were less interested or capable or should be treated any differently.
His opinions demonstrated that he holds biases against women and minorities, and he thinks the company is doing the wrong thing by hiring more of both. Whether those biases are justified by his "science" (they aren't) or not, is neither here nor there, he's a walking legal landmine. On that basis alone, it would be perfectly justified to fire him.
Now, should he be able to express his opinions? Sure! Talk to your friends at a bar. Find people you think are like-minded and discuss this. Better yet: find people you know to hold the opposite opinion and discuss it with them. Don't fucking spread something company-wide and then complain when you get fired.
> I believe it's illegal in the US to fire someone for their political leanings, but not if you say something outrageous like women aren't built for tech jobs (or whatever he said).
It's easy to circumvent the legal issue, just have a vague code of conduct and claim the employee broke said code of conduct.
>> Of course we can. It's the government that can't.
Is that true? I'm not American or a lawyer so I don't know what workplace discrimination laws are like, but I would assume that in many western countries, you can't legally discriminate against or harass workers or fellow employees based on their beliefs.
This opens up a legal question to which I don't know the answer: Where would these "step down" tweets tread legally with respect to workplace harassment?
> Maybe they should be removed from their job if it's something related to their job, but it almost never is. It always comes down to "this person disagrees with me, therefore cause their employer a nuisance till its no longer worth employing them". There's not a moral court judgement or fairness, it's just some people harassing other people and insisting they deserve it.
The problem is that anything can be "related to their job" if you're willing to stretch enough. For instance, by hitting PR notes like "do you want your company to be known as being associated with this kind of person."
> I still very much believe nobody was in the wrong here
This just doesn't strike me as reasonable. The employee was in the wrong. Clearly. Just because the thing you support is a moral and good thing to support doesn't mean you get to foist your activism upon everyone else around you. I care about endangered species conservation - but if I did what this person did and held the organization hostage to my demands I'd be looked at sideways, and rightfully so.
It's not that there's no place for activism in the workplace, it's just that the line should be drawn at the point where it starts harming the organization as a whole.
> That is, your first paragraph appears to be arguing that it's only OK to fire an employee for "hostile work environment" if that employee does something hostile at work, and never OK to fire based on stuff an employee has written before being hired.
What do you think a hostile work environment is? How do writings outside of work affect the work environment? The work environment is...things that happen at work. In order for the employee to have created a hostile work environment they would have to, you know, act hostilely at work. That is literally what it means.
An employee proselytizing their religion at work might create a hostile work environment. If they go door-to-door and proselytize on the weekends, and never mention their religion at work, that does not create a hostile work environment and they shouldn't be fired for what they do in their own time. I don't see how that is hard to understand.
> It isn't easy. People interact on social media and at work and so if you're angrily criticizing the plight of the Palestinians on social media, your pro-Israel co-worker may bring that conflict into work with them.
There are many dimensions to this:
1. Is Alice speaking for the company or can be construed as speaking for the company? Like does her Twitter profile say "VP of X at Y" and is a verified profile? Like I know there are certain topics that have been in the news about my employer that I simply won't comment on because I never want to be quoted in the press as "Employee of X said ...". That's just common sense. And you can also be (rightly) terminated if your actions or statements reflect badly on the company or the company otherwise has to spend time dealing with;
2. Assuming the first person isn't speaking for the company and the second person is simply aware of their social media presence, it gets a lot trickier. I can sit here and say "just do your job" but would I be saying that if I were African-American and my coworker was spouting some White supremacist crap on Twitter? Probably not. There are degrees too. Reposting links on your personal Twitter in your free time is one thing. Putting up a Confederate flag in your cubicle is something else;
3. You should generally be comfortable with what your employer does. So let's say you're deeply evangelical and completely anti-abortion. Should you work for Planned Parenthood? Probably not. I mean if you can and want to, that's fine. But there are limits on what an employer should be expected to do to accommodate your views.
> ... and yet their company saw the "disruption" as a bigger threat than the loss of talent.
Obviously specifics matter here but let me express some generalities.
If you express views where your coworkers don't want to work with you because of those views then yeah you've created a problem. Even for an engineer the technical side isn't everything. You will still need to work with people. Supporting homophobic policies when you have a gay worker means you've brought something into work that has disrupted that work (as an example).
>If your boss (or their boss, or their boss, etc.) makes it clear they don't support that: that's not a political statement, it's workplace discrimination / harassment.
I am going to speak plainly. I don't think people in the Valley really believe this argument. Political opinion is a protected class in California yet people feel free to create a hostile work environment for Trump supporters. It feels like there a set of right answers and you can say the right answers or shut up.
By talking to people and using your people skills.
> Is there a definition for what constitutes "harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination"?
Yes. It's not a written definition. It's a living and changing definition created by the people who work there and how YOU make them feel. You need to use your people skills in order to extract the definition from your co-workers.
> wouldn't be taken seriously, because such ideas are obviously false.
This is the core of your misunderstanding. The scientific merit of ideas has zero relationship to whether or not you are harassing someone. Anyone who said the offensive things I wrote wouldn't be taken seriously and would be fired because they are offensive. True or not. Obviously true or not. And for all you know, whoever said the above does work for cheap Jews (my apologies if I've offended anyone with this language - I love Jews like everyone else and I hope you can understand I'm using this for illustration purposes only).
> For me, it comes down to whether we want to live in a society where we acknowledge reality, or not. Where people debate ideas, or not.
Look Mom! We are freely debating something right here, right in society!
Don't confuse "Google" (an employer) with "society". No one is forcing you to work at Google nor for your employment status to be determined by their code of conduct.
Even HN has a code of conduct, and yet you seem to be ok debating things here.
>>If the employee says something the company doesn't like, the company is free to dismiss the employee.
Except they are not, even in the US with its meagre employee protections there are entire classes of protected activity that you cannot be fired for, and discussing your working conditions while at work(and being critical of them) is protected.
>>This is pretty obviously a political prosecution
Going after the people who break the law is political now? Fascinating. What's next, we let burglars walk free if they are of a specific political belief?
> We can follow it to it's logical conclusion because it happens all the time. People get fired for unpopular opinions frequently.
In most of the Western World that would be illegal and you'd have a clear cut wrongful termination case.
> I am getting the impression that you see a clear line between what belongs at work and what belongs at home. How do you define it?
Most of it is incredibly clear, what I do at home or while I'm not representing the company is none of the companies business, what I do at work is the companies business, there are only a few places where the line is blurred. The first is posting from company property (like I'm doing now), I'd say this should be either completely prohibited or allowed, and if it's allowed they shouldn't be able to police what I say. The second is on social media, companies and governments have definitely pushed beyond what should be allowed here, anything I post on facebook is only relevant to the company if I'm representing them or divulging private information. The third is lunch room or water cooler chatter, I'd argue people should be allowed to share their opinions here, but it's blurry enough that most people just stay away from anything remotely controversial in these environments.
A correct statement, but one that skirts around the issue at hand: in this situation the people berating their evangelical coworker are creating a hostile workplace environment and the company is obligated to take actions to remidiate this situation. If the climate denier points out this hostile workplace behavior, they're not censoring any particular view. Only the hostile actions of their co-worker.
While Weiss' high profile position makes it much more likely to receive public scrutiny, she is indeed entitled to the same workplace protections as a mid level software developer. Working as a columnist doesn't absolve a company of their legal responsibility to curb workplace harassment. Your workplace is a captive audience. What is legal for some random person to say to you is not at all the same standard that is applied to co-workers. Weiss calling this behavior out as discrimination is not calling any particular belief illegal, only the treatment towards her by her coworkers.
reply