This isn’t about employers controlling what people do in their private lives. If you want to go do racist shit in your off hours then your employer can’t stop you.
What your employer CAN do is make an informed decision about whether a person who does racist shit in their off hours is qualified for a specific job position.
I’m not intent on hopelessness at all. I actually do expect to see progress within my lifetime.
I’m just intent on not further entrenching corporations as an unelected, unaccountable secondary government.
Which you seem to keep believing we’re all arguing, which we are not. There are certainly things that people should NOT be fired over. Being a racist in public, which has consequences in one’s job, should not be one of them. We will not fix our society if we don’t directly address ills like racism (FINALLY) and ensure that EVERYONE has a safe work environment. I’m gonna guess if you go look at their policies, most of the major unions do not condone racism either and would support the firing of an employee who showed racist tendencies, even in their private lives. Because that shit DOES impact the work space.
Or say, if an employer finds out their employee violently harassed patrons at a library’s Drag Queen Story Hour, they can actively decide not to employ such a poor representative for their brand.
Do I actually expect companies to just automatically ‘do the right thing?’
Hell no; but I am damn certain that they can be shamed/sued into doing it…
Without any actual effort to achieve it… or at least having a less demoralizing attitude when discussing it?
Good luck.
You have a nice day now; as it’s clear there’s nothing to be gained from this particular exchange.
I have no idea how you get from “I don’t want to increase the power capital has over workers.” to “No actual effort to achieve it.”
There’s lots of effort to achieve things that don’t involve empowering corporations.
It’s like people can’t differentiate between “I don’t think the war on drugs is very good.” and “I think heroin addiction is great, or at least there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Again, good day.
Except you seem to be proposing that employees should be so protected from being fired that a company has no way to protect other employees from people expressing very hostile attitudes towards other employees.
We don’t want companies to have power over peoples private lives.
But they currently do have power over people for a big section of the day so we are stuck with trying to get them to fire hostile people who hurt other workers.
You can’t protect the vulnerable employees and the hostile employees at the same time.
Edit: we can take a great deal of power away from companies and I’m all for that, but protecting bigots is not part of that process.
You’re missing both the point and the practice. The ability to use an employees’ social media posts as evidence of bigotry is important because it is very difficult to prove many forms of discrimination in the workplace. Often times when a number of employees claim they are being discriminated against by a supervisor, the only independent evidence is from public behavior outside of work. Social media is public behavior. So this isn’t about fighting racism itself; it’s about protecting employees from discrimination. And that’s regardless of whether the organization is private, public, governmental, or NGO.
The practice is also not to continuously surveil employees’ social media - who has time for that shit? - but rather to highlight specific social media activity as a sign of discriminatory behavior. So it’s not corporate behavior so much as grass-roots investigation. At least, that’s how it happens in reality.
That’s a point I’m sympathetic to. I can’t really object to looking as part of an investigation if an accusation is made.
It’s not an increase in power over what they have and what they have exercised for many, many reasons - over many, many years.
Or in another real-world example, as an educator I regularly have to do background checks as part of my job. If an employer found out that I’d committed some crime which made me a likely danger to my students or colleagues then I couldn’t just say “that doesn’t count, it was during my off hours!”
Fuckin’ A, y’all.
the power capital has over workers.
WTF is this even supposed to mean?
I can only assume you intend definition #2 of capital, you’ve used it multiple times…
wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available or contributed for a particular purpose such as starting a company or investing.
What are you getting at? Are you using “capitalism” and “capital” interchangeably?
In that real world example, seeing how many people’s lives are held back due to a past conviction for marijuana possession or petty theft keeping them from getting a real job, I would like to see much more restriction on what kinds of crimes can be used to disqualify someone for what kind of work.
Or just sealing the records entirely if they were long enough ago and a public interest justification can’t be made for keeping them open.
Capital, the owners/institutions possessing and controlling property whose ownership can be used to gain more property.
Bosses, landlords, etc.
As a USian, that usage is very confusing. But thank you for clarifying.
Which is NOT the same thing as posting racist shit on social media. Once again, the supposed “division” between work and leisure time is pretty thin at the best of times. It’s incredibly naive to think that someone has the magical ability to both be racist (which is a coherent, ideological world view that shapes pretty much all aspects of one’s life) and be not racist in the work place. It always spills over into one’s work life. EVERYONE deserves a workspace that’s free from any type of discrimination and having corporations be forced to ensure that make a lot of sense as long as we live in a society shaped by capitalism (which is deeply steeped in bigoted thinking and tightly entwined with those ideologies).
And the reality is that THIS is the world we DO live in, and we need to work to make it as livable as possible for everyone until we can change our entire society. That takes time and effort, and pushing back against racism and other ills as much as pushing for greater workers rights. Because “the workers” are not defined as being only white men.
I would very much like to see laws passed to protect workers from being fired for unrelated crimes and nebulous morals clauses
However, racist and bigoted behavior should never be included in those protections. And you don’t get to one with the other.
The right is pushing for a world where one wouldn’t get fired for racist behavior but I’d still get fired for being found out as poly or part of the kink scene or an anarchist. Or if they really get their way for being queer.
You don’t start with protecting the racists first, I assure you those protections will never trickle down.
You start by protecting vulnerable groups and work out from there.
Just like the problem with censorship. When the right cries, they will come for you next. They came for us first and the right just wants to roll back to when they could get away with whatever and only the “deviant” were being deplatformed.
You don’t protect the most privileged first.
