[ayyy]

> I don't see how that is hard to understand.

For a growing percentage of the workplace, knowing that a coworker has a socially unacceptable opinion is creating a hostile work environment.

I completely understand where you're coming from, but you're literally wrong. If you don't want to be shunned from society, don't be identified as someone who does socially unacceptable things.

I'm not super keen on how this is all shaking out either, but it's pretty obvious how to avoid problems at this point.

[roenxi]

They aren't literally wrong; we've covered this ground when deciding the role religion plays in society and made some excellent decisions that we don't want to lose.

People who claim to have superior moral principles do not get to enforce them in the workplace. Organisations that rally around moral principles don't get to decide who does and does not enjoy employment.

Intransigent squeaky wheels do not get to decide what "hostile work environment" means. It has to mean hostility in the work environment. If it comes to mean "disagrees with my politics" then society is in for a world of hurt.

[SiVal]

"Socially unacceptable" is the litmus test? So, regardless of what the majority of your coworkers think, if you express a contrary opinion that they don't agree is acceptable, you have created a hostile environment.

"If you don't want to be shunned from society, don't be identified as someone who does socially unacceptable things," warned the Holy Inquisition and every Puritan minister.

[ithkuil]

Now with tables turned, not few people gloat when people complain getting a taste of their own medicine.

While I understand the short term gratification, I find this dangerous long term.

For all the failures of the old norms and methods, at least there was a way to formally abjure your antisocial beliefs and get accepted back into society.

Today not only we didn't yet develop such a code, but we also leave a permanent trace of our past blunders and misplaced allegeances which are now permanently associated with our identity.

Precedents of this scenario create anxiety in a lot of moderate people, most who are even agreeing with the majority of the zeitgeist.

Regular people may not be vocal about it, so we get a perception that now only KKK folks are whining about freedom of speech.

[ayyy]

If there's a Holy Inquisition coming, it's not bad advice to become notionally Catholic for however long it lasts.

[goatlover]

> For a growing percentage of the workplace, knowing that a coworker has a socially unacceptable opinion is creating a hostile work environment.

Which is basically supporting the wrong political party at this point.

Are we really sure we want to go down this road?

[imgabe]

I understand that a growing number of people are confused about what hostile work environment means. That still does not change the meaning as the law defines it, nor should we change it to accommodate those people.

[ayyy]

As a practical matter, you'd have to be insane to be espousing very unpopular views under the same name you use for employment.

If I do something outside of work in a public way, and a significant percentage of coworkers find it objectionable, it will shrink my professional network and make building relationships more difficult. Nobody wants to work with someone they find morally repulsive. There's no legal recourse available for this.

Also, from my coworkers' point of view, I'm the one causing the workplace to be unpleasant, and they might start a campaign to have me removed.

From my employer's point of view, I've done some action outside of work that's caused a problem, and now we have a problem at work. That means I've caused a problem at work.

If I can be terminated without legal risk, my employer can terminate me to satisfy the other coworkers.

If I can't be terminated legally, then I can be sidelined, put on a PIP, and eventually forced out of the organization. There's unlikely to be any legal recourse available to me if this is done correctly with good documentation.

Maybe employment shouldn't work this way, but it does.

[imgabe]

Yes, as a practical matter, there are many injustices past and present that people put up with for the sake of their own well-being. Unfortunately, the injustices only stop when we stop putting up with them.

[DyslexicAtheist]

I think there are several problems in how things are framed and the language we use. This is important because conflict resolution depends on it.

1) "creating a hostile work environment" means different things to different people which makes it hard to pin down.

2) Person Y claims "Person X made them feel unsafe", which can't be proven since there are no outside witnesses to how people "feel". Maybe I just disliked the person for other reasons and this gave me an opportunity to get at them.

3) People will get offended easily for billions of reasons depending on what their believes are (especially in a heavily polarized society).

4) Solidarity: my friend/coworker who I like claims X makes them feel unsafe so I believe them and stand in solidarity with them because I know them better than I know X. This can easily be turned into "I don't feel safe" in order to get back at them because the moment you have an additional "witness" it will get harder to question the event with every person who says they also feel this way. It becomes safer to just stand with them or to say you weren't there but very risky to stand up for the (alleged) perpetrator.

There is a saying "I can't change what people say, but I can change my reaction and how I feel about them, and whether I allow it to affect me".

If the framing/language requires me to trust that the other party is truthful (but which I don't) then solving the resolving the conflict is impossible.

Personally I dislike the woke movement because I come from a different time where we were told to settle things by ourselves and the person screaming or appealing to the higher authority was not applauded for doing so but considered a coward. This had also many problems but they were not better or worse than what we do today.

When I see my friends bring up their children and protecting them not only from physical harm but also insulating them from the feeling of offense, telling them it's their right never to have a feeling that they don't like and blame the other party the moment they do, so they never experience outrage and how to deal with it - then it becomes clear (to me) why so many kids have turned into idiots. If we then give these people virtual/digital technology and rob them of any real type of social connections and a chance to resolve conflict IRL it's a recipe for exactly this kind of disaster.