Workplace Sexual Harassment is bad, mmkay? (Splinter from Brad Wardell thread)

Sure no one is obligated, but then one can hardly come in 2-3 days later railing against the poor bastard who expressed himself poorly at the outset. Alternately, hearing over and over how I agreed with this guy's bad choice, having repeated nearly a half dozen times that I do not, illustrated to me bad faith in part already. Fair standard?

That term came about as a progression of discussion, probably seeded as a response to sentence-fragments-as-replies and to musings about the Doc having a mental illness. Originally my point was that hey everyone so often lets down their guard and makes an inappropriate comment (a failure to exercise superlative will against any and all errors of judgement) which would be sexual harassment.* With responses then varying from "it already is sexual harassment" to "ARE YOU SAYING NO MAN CONTROLS THE WILL OF HIS BALLS", my terms escalated. This was not, to me, the core issue; but it addressed such counter-points as the notion that beating one's wife is essentially the same as making a locker-room comment in the office (I'm speaking of the internal drive, not the external effects). Both are interntional acts with consequences but the latter seems significantly easier to let slip on occasion.

Turns out I was unaware that "failure of the will" is (apparently) some kind of pre-existing technical phrase that already has a body of understanding around it.

*in fact the Doc had already been inappropriate but the employee simply hadn't complained and triggered the legal "harassment" situation.

In most states, the state really only acts as a middleman. You file for unemployment with the state, and assuming they agree you fit the requirements, they file paperwork with the company to start payments. The company pays the state, the state pays you. In the cases of a company that folds and no one assumes liability through purchase of debt/assets, the state will make the payments themselves (or find a new way to decline you). I believe there are states that do require companies to pay into a fund and that fund does the unemployment payouts, but most At Will states, to my knowledge, follow the former model, not the latter.

Yes that is correct, sorry if my wording was vague.

And I understand that some companies in some states pay insurers to cover the gap if the company doesn't have the assets. My grandmother used to run a gasket company and told me once: if you ever find out your company isn't paying it's unemployment or unemployment insurance - leave immediately.

Yet another reason At Will states hate workers. Talk about creating terrible incentives.

Washington state appears to be what I was thinking of.

I understand the inclintation to retreat to arguing minutae and semantics when you've been called on the carpet, so to speak, but framing your arguments as a response to provocation strikes me as a bit misleading when your first post of any length on this topic teed up the issue squarely through this query:

Frankly, I could care less whether you utilize "failure of will" or some other particular terminology to describe the phenomenon. The essential point that I find troubling is that you've framed the narrative as one of empathy towards the employer and his behavior and utilized that as a justification for dismissing her.

You are free to select whatever sub-section of my first post that you like, ignore the context in which I wrote it, treat it like my main narrative point, craft your opinion according to my assumed intent, and then respond however you like. Nothing like some good faith to move a discussion along productive grounds! (yo Lizard_King: fair standard?)

But I won't allow you continue the baldfaced lie that I'm in any way empathetic or in agreement or on his side in firing her, without calling you to the carpet, so to speak.

I have had to fire far too many people in all my years, and I'm with you: Even if a person has been warned, coached, refused to help themselves, etc. I don't sleep for a couple of nights before the day of the firing. I understand that this is about to be a horrible day in this person's life, and they often have a family who will suffer from this. They will be going home and telling their spouse, "I don't have a job." and they will be thrown into turmoil and stress and often their lives will be completely in disarray.

I have worked with some managers for whom firing was no big deal. They are almost always poor managers and dysfunctional human beings.

For fuck's sake, it was fun early on for me to hammer the 'like' button every time someone would be all "Oh, shift, you're such a dipshit", but it's gotten to the point where it's not amusing anymore because people continue to tell him what he's saying when he's been on the record a half dozen times that that is not what he believes.

Fucking stop it (not just you, but everyone).

Just because he isn't blindly going "Yeah, totally, 100% with you, WOOOO!" doesn't mean he's all "Yeah, fire that bitch!" It's like the thread participants are aghast at the audacity of someone not adhering to their collective rage in all its varied forms. 95% agreement clearly isn't good enough. Shit, 100% agreement but asking questions or showing the slightest bit of empathy for the other side in an attempt to understand the issues is also going to be pounced on. Pointing out that just assuming that the decision was wrong because "LOL, old white guys, amirite?" resulted in scorn.

Rereading his comments the two things I think he's been guilty of are:

- being trolled by people who took exception to his questions/framing and his assumed position on the issues. They made snarky non-responses which he then felt the need to respond to which created more parallel threads than a first year CS student discovering fork().

- bringing up the 'iron will' thing, which became its own merry tangent. While a huge derail, at its core there was a reasonable question asked in the clumsiest manner possible. I took that question to be "How can society formalize the handling of a situation where an employer is distrustful of their own self-control with regards to a single employee and thus terminates that employee, and how does this affect the notion of at-will employment?" It was framed in an unfortunate manner that made it seem like this was a problem for all employers and specifically addressed the romantic element and the hypothetical "How would you handle this?", so instead of rational responses we got variants of "LOL, act like an adult?" followed by endless musings about shift's perception of the limits of self-control.*

It's an interesting question, because there is a strong tension between worker's rights/protected class/discrimination and at-will employment, and as this case illustrates, there's a very murky area filled with potential situations where you have some stuff act as proxies for discrimination (e.g. criminal records/background checks) and sometimes just regular old douchebag-employer-can-be-douchey-because-that's-the-law stuff.

Going back and re-reading shift's posts, I don't think I even saw him state any strong opinions other than "employer was a douchebag", everything else were questions (some were leading, many were not) that resulted in his crucifixion for merely asking.

* And to be fair, the 'Iron Will perk' thing was a huge WTF moment for me as well

I don't agree that "How can society formalize the handling of a situation where an employer is distrustful of their own self-control with regards to a single employee and thus terminates that employee, and how does this affect the notion of at-will employment?" is a reasonable question. It frames sexual harassment as an issue of self-control when it is not. People aren't objecting to the framing of the question, they're objecting to the premise underlying the question. Lizard_King explained in an earlier post why this framing of self-control/willpower is itself sexist.

Where in that 'reasonable question' is there even an assumption of sexual harassment or even gender? If a question is posited in the abstract, it's unfair to then take that and apply it to a single case and say "Hah! Sexism!"

To me the interesting question is the abstract question because this specific case is fairly cut and dry (or, at least, it's been analyzed to death here), but the extension of its ramifications going forward are a lot more interesting.

In fact, to me it's even more reasonable to expand that question to at-will and discrimination-by-proxy, where you can have a lot of different situations where direct sexual harassment (or racism or homophobia or whatever) isn't present but indirect forms could be interpreted.

Just finished catching up on this thread; it took four months and 71 pages for it to get majorly derailed, you guys are impressive.

I don't really understand what you mean. We're talking about a case where an employer sexually harassed an employee, then dismissed that employee because he and his wife thought that he "couldn't help himself". Based on this scenario, you ask a question about "How can society formalize the handling of a situation where an employer is distrustful of their own self-control with regards to a single employee?" By doing so, you treat a scenario relating to sexual harassment as one that is rooted in "self-control". I reject the premise, because refraining from sexual harassment has nothing to do with self-control. The only way of expunging the issues of sexual harassment and gender from consideration here is to totally ignore the surrounding context of the case, which is not an approach that makes any sense to me.

How is it in unfair to take a question posited in the abstract, and then look at it in light of the real-life situation that produced the question in the first place? That seems perfectly fair to me.

But more importantly, I don't see how you can even ask a question about an employer "being distrustful of their own self-control" in the abstract. We need to know what the employer is being distrustful of to make any sense of your question; the answer to the question depends on what impulse the employer is having trouble controlling. So, I think if an employer is having trouble refraining from raping or killing an employee, the employer should probably have him- or herself institutionalized. If an employer is having trouble over-eating, he or she may wish to see a dietician.

The point is that you can't ask these questions in the abstract. The context in this case is sexual harassment and sexual discrimination. There's no way of putting that to the side or ignoring it.

Yeah, the reason I keep being so easily trolled back in instead of just quitting the thread is that while I have no trouble admitting poor communication or "being wrong"* or agreeing to disagree or just stop replying, I cannot tolerate multiple ongoing attempts to frame me personally as a harassment apologist who thinks that slave-to-my-dick-even-with-unwilling-women (that's rape, folks) is somehow "valid" or "justified" or any of the other frankly grotesque descriptors used thus far.

*I believe this is a clear terminating offense on the internet, but only in right-to-ban states.

Check out our nipples!

Ugh, do I have to sign another NDA (Nipple Disclosure Agreement ohmygodimsosorry)

Dude, just stop already. There is no conspiracy. You are not a victim. You are not being framed.

You said some weird crap and then people questioned and/or mocked you for it. That's all that happened. Your major mistake was, as LK put it, trying too hard to be clever rather than clear, and so a lot of what you said ended up either outright weird or sort of ambiguously creepy.

If what you said isn't really what you believe, then fine, people fail to communicate well all the time. I'm sure guilty of it often enough. This self-martyring crap isn't doing you any favors, though.

I mean, really, "multiple ongoing attempts to frame me personally"? Get over yourself, dude. You got flamed on a forum. This isn't Watergate and you are not being impeached.

Put down the cross and let this one go.

He can't. He lacks the self-control.

Not to rain on your crucifixion, but I'm guessing he meant frame as in the all the times people have used the terms frame/reframe here, i.e. position an argument or idea in a different form. Not like frame as in "to incriminate falsely by planting evidence".

It works either way in nlanza's post as well. In both cases, the key point is who had agency over making shift6 look like he said x.

To be fair though, Michigan, for example, has been at-will as long as I've been alive, despite being an extremely strong union state up until the last 10 years.

Also, was there some sort of ugly thread merger that lead to the Stardock thread ending up here covered in santorum?

Here's your unwitting patient zero, although obviously it took a village to raise this baby. To build on that mixed metaphor: sometimes I think it's just hard to see what will end up being controversial, and on a long enough timeline everything starts to feel personal and then sometimes personal in bad ways.

~Deeper Thoughts

I'm for clipping everything on Page 68+ off into its own thread, as it should have been its own thread in the first place. This thread shouldn't be a dump for miscellaneous sexual harassment stories from outside the game industry.

Quick, Lum! Say that you find Elyscape irresistible and get rid of him before he takes your job!

The UnderLum has spoken, the revolution has begun!

It's time to chose a side, it's time to light the lights, it's time to meet the muppets on Broken Forum tonight!

Basically mirrored my experience when I had to fire people in Utah, another at will state. Bonus, I got to represent the company in the unemployment mediation hearings when the people I fired for cause tried to claim benefits. So not only did I get to walk them out of the building, I got to go on conference calls with them weeks later and tell them specifically why they sucked to much to have a call center job.

I do not miss that job.

Where'd the main thread for Brad Wardell yenta-ing go?

Back to games

Oooh. It's on page 2. Makes sense.

Can you give me the name of that textbook? It clearly is not one of the ones I read in law school.

I think this is yet another example of Alex arguing Canadian law with regards to a US case.

"Yet another example"? My forum cred is clearly on the rise.

Co-worker unwilling to go out with you, and rejecting your repeated advances? Is your workplace (arguably half-assedly) addressing the problem by changing your co-worker's work schedule so that the two of you won't be working the same shifts any more, thus thwarting your ability to keep chipping away at her resolve on a daily basis? No problem, on one of your off-days just hang around the building till they get off work and then handcuff yourself to them until they agree to a date (and/or long term relationship).

Such a gesture is likely to flatter... just about anybody.

Source.
EDIT: Better Source.
...And this source finally actually lists what crime he pled to: false imprisonment.

I wonder if he first tried to plead insanity.