Get Out of My Head
The Christians who want to be intolerant again. Just to be difficult (I do love to be difficult, you know), I want to add that there is one place where one of the complainants had a point, though not a religious point.
In a 2004 case, for instance, an AT&T Broadband employee won the right to express his religious convictions by refusing to sign a pledge to “respect and value the differences among us.” As long as the employee wasn’t harassing co-workers, the company had to make accommodations for his faith, a federal judge in Colorado ruled.
That’s a pretty grotesque pledge, frankly. It’s a pretty demanding employer who wants to tell employees what to respect and value, and it’s an employer both demanding and reckless who demands that employees respect and value ‘the differences among us’ without saying which ones. (Maybe AT&T did say, but the quotation doesn’t mention it.) Both demanding and reckless, but that is a pretty common formula – celebrate diversity; value difference. Well – it depends, doesn’t it! Murderers are different, rapists are different, persecutors are different, narrow-minded bigoted fag-haters of the Fred Phelps school are different; so what?
But in truth even if the employer did specify, the demand would still be an intrusive, invasive, presumptuous demand. What we respect and value is, I submit, a pretty basic internal matter – a pretty basic aspect of what we call the self. In short, pretty damn personal. Our employers don’t get to tell us what to respect and value: I’ll respect and value whatever I decide and want and choose to respect and value, not what my employer decides and chooses. Employers can tell us what to do – on the job – in many ways, but they can’t tell us what to think. Even if they’re right. Clearly they are right, up to a point – in a perfect world, we would all respect and value each other, and all would be peace and joy (and boredom, but never mind). But since this isn’t a perfect world, the point beyond which they are not right is not very far up the road.
At least they weren’t being told to ‘celebrate’ it. I hate being told to celebrate stuff.
However, on specifics, the employee in question objected to being told to ‘respect and value’ homosexuals, since as a christian he considered them sinful.
The judge awarded him $146,269 for, among other things, emotional distress (I really wish I weren’t so sanguine, a few grand’s worth of emotional distress woould come in handy, but the best I can manage is irritation).
The judge made much the same point as OB;
‘The judge listed several things the company could have done to avoid the firing, such as communicating better, getting more details about Buonanno’s concerns, clarifying what the company intended by the language in question, accepting his pledge not to discriminate, or even rewriting the language to make it less ambiguous…’
http://hr.blr.com/display.cfm/id/9472
I agree that no-one can tell another what to think, but an employer can reasonably specify that expressing certain thoughts is inappropriate in the work place. If someone joined a team I was running and announced that they could not respect a colleague’s views because they regarded women/gays/blacks/jews/ disabled as inherently inferior and displeasing to god, I’d want the tosser off my team. And I’d guarantee to cause them emotional distress in the meantime.
AT&T seem to have put together a vague feel-good policy and paid for it.
Yeah – I didn’t look it up, because I wanted to address that particular phrase in isolation from the specifics. Okay also because I was in a hurry.
“but an employer can reasonably specify that expressing certain thoughts is inappropriate in the work place”
Of course! Absolutely. An employer can and indeed should expect (and if necessary demand) that employees be civil to each other. But it can’t and shouldn’t tell us what to think. We have to be civil even without thinking everyone is adorable or respect-worthy. We also have to be able to decide on our own thoughts.
“Tolerate and be civil” sounds a bit more like it than respect and value. As someone cleared up for me a long while back, you can’t control or be held accountable for your feelings but you can control your actions. (Said actions can lead to consequences that affect your feelings bigtime, but anyway.) I too have a serious allergy to having anyone else tell me what to value or respect or celebrate, what to be proud of, and especially what to love.
Thing is, employers have too damn much power any more, it seems, and can force any damn thing out of you. And so many people see no way out, and just put up with it. –Well, that’s worth a whole nother thread, or several, then again maybe I am just paranoid. (Some of you folks with better historical knowledge or longer memories than mine could answer this–is there any resemblance here to the loyalty oaths that some workers had to take back in the 30’s or the 50’s or whenever it was?)
But Don nailed it good about the vagueness of the policy being a big part of the problem. Wonder where they learned to be vague?
That is one of the milder cases of businesses doing what they do to their employees. I have a friend who was working in the complaint department of a cable tv seller. The cable tv seller got a great idea, called the complaint department together, and announced that they were now educators. When someone called up to complain about not getting the ESPN 2 volleyball championship and called you a bitch in the process, you were supposed to assure the sir in question that his problem would be solved and then educate him. Education would consist of telling him about a new, more expensive suite of channels he could get.
My friend pointed out that this was not known as education where she came from. It was known as selling. And selling usually came with a commission, didn’t it?
This was not received at all well. Obviously selling had gone the way of “small” at starbucks — there is now no such thing.
My friend took this as a wonderful time to quit.