RapierFugue
Posts: 4740
Joined: 3/16/2006
From: London, England
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LafayetteLady
As I stated before, the other posters obviously are unfamiliar with that type of blue collar work environment
Incorrect. You don’t know what I do for a job (which admittedly these days is probably 90% white- and 10% blue), and you don’t know what I used to do as a job, but it certainly wasn’t white-collar, in fact at the time was considered the 5th most dangerous job on earth, and (once again) bullying is bullying. It’s got nothing to do with “holier than thou” – it’s just bad business, and as the market weeds out companies who don’t get their act together, so it develops over time that we treat people more as human beings and less as beasts of burden.
What's interesting (well, ok, not that interesting, but it's a slow Wednesday and I'm waiting for a courier to turn up with some stuff I need) about this thread is that the development of the responses mirrors nicely what one sees in commercial environments when companies try to make changes to the way their staff are treated - it usually goes something like this (more or less, not always in this order, but more often than you'd imagine):
1. “There’s no problem! Don't be daft!” (then why are we talking about it? Usually coz someone sued or got hurt, or we lost someone good to a competitor)
2. You outsiders don’t understand <industry X> (point to n years experience running successful teams in said industry and ask them to think of why our teams work, whereas yours are tricky to recruit into, and retain staff with)
3. “It’s just a joke! They (the victim) don’t mind!” (You don’t know that. You can never, short of a polygraph test, know that – did you enjoy it when you went through it? – that last one probably not a good one to ask of certain BDSM folk, but there we are)
4. “Every other company in <industry X> does it!” (no they don’t, and even if they did, would that make a wrong thing right?)
5. “It lets people bond!” (no it doesn't; it establishes a hierarchy based on animal behaviours and, if juniors are later promoted beyond those who hazed them, causes massive management problems later on)
6. “Oh come on! There's no harm in it! <Business X> doesn't suffer at all!” (Yes it does, firstly because, sooner or later, we get our arses sued into the middle of next week but, secondly, and more importantly, it makes retaining good staff more difficult, makes people management more difficult, and often leads to long-term resentments that are too deep to fix easily, so we end up transferring people around simply because a few Neanderthals can’t play nicely)
7. And so on and so forth ...
I've seen it enough times, and fixed it enough times, to know that it’s always counter-productive in the medium-to-long term, and almost always ends up being fixed, sadly often when someone has been hurt, or has left a job they could have been very good at through no fault of their own. And, even in a fairly tight labour market (although certain sectors understand that there's a huge difference between having lots of people on the unemployment line, and having lots of people available with the right skills, even in blue-collar jobs – in fact, often even more in blue-collar trades) high (or just higher than competitors) staff turnover absolutely cripples every company, from SMEs upwards.
Bottom line is the times they are a changin’, and successful businesses of all colours (blue and white) understand that the old ways are done; as I said at the start of this, everyone now has a legally enshrined right to work without being subject to certain pressures, as the stress of working life is often bad enough on its own, without clueless brain-deads making life even more difficult for others. As a comparator, would anyone claim that sexual harassment is still ok in the workplace? Course not, but 30-40 years ago it was, or was considered to be by many. This is the same sort of thing, and it’s thankfully being stamped out, individual by individual, and company by company.
Now obviously this was a relatively minor incident in and of itself, but the attitudes demonstrated by the OP are precisely the kind of rubbish that's been trotted out any number of times before over the years and I'm guaranteeing you, and I mean stone cold, 24-carat, stake-your-mortgage-on-it guaranteeing you, that either the OP changes their MO (as I suspect they already have, having read the thread and responses) or sooner or later they're going to be looking for a new job.
PS: I don't know about the US law (actually I do, just not in this line of work), but you're 100% wrong about management having to have the opportunity to "fix" things by initial complaint. In the UK (indeed the whole of the EU) there is such a thing as "constructive dismissal", which is defined as ""An employer must not, without reasonable or proper cause, conduct himself in a manner calculated or likely to destroy or seriously damage the relationship of trust and confidence between the employer and the employee.", and one of the clauses under that as reasoning for deeming it so (as constructive dismissal) is "Harassment or humiliation" and/or "Victimisation of a staff member", which the OP fell afoul of almost from sentence one.
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RE: Do you mess with the vanilla's in your life? - 
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Three times this month to mechanics over fuel problems and yet I am still dealing with them, aargh. Thought I wouldn't be able to add my two cents into this thread. Okay, OP, here is my answer... 
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