I’m not going to defend the policy as reasonable, but I think it’s the right policy. When you find out a person with more power in the organization is romantically involved with a person with less power, you need to apply some kind of test to see if it was appropriate or not. All tests have false positives and false negatives. The only exceptions are the “always wrong” and “always okay” tests which completely eliminated false “okay” and “wrong” requests respectively. The “always wrong” test is being applied here, and that test may be unreasonable (in that we don’t even attempt to use our reason in applying it) but it also might be the right test to apply in this circumstance.
How many set-for-life-millionaires is it worth firing to protect one minimum wage worker who has to feed their kids from being raped by their boss?
I think what we’re seeing happen is that for decades women have been saying, “Could we incrementally move this way we think about workplace romance so that it condones a little less rape?” without a lot of results, and then finally recently the pressure broke the dam and the needle swung to policies like this (in some places, in others the get-away-with-rape thing is still going strong). I think there is a very good case that we, as a society, need to live with the “it’s always wrong” policy for a while and then start incrementally moving towards a “okay, let’s be a little reasonable” side, instead of continuing to try to get to reasonable from the other direction.
I agree with all of this entirely (with a sprinkle of perhaps there is more to this than meets the eye).
We have no idea what her role in the company was. She could have been his direct report or she could have been an executive, or she could have been a fry cook. So, yes I agree it was more in the “zero tolerance” vein than anything else.
Yeah, there’s a lot more that could be said about that. (I especially like @jaded’s machiavellian scenario where the exit was planned anyway and the reason was staged purely to send a message. I mean, I’d be genuinely surprised if that was true, but it’s a hell of a thought. But there is a really good chance that something much worse was going on here, and my personal theory is that the only reason a CEO gets kicked out by the board is palace intrigue.)
I don’t know. Is it a good thing to assume that people on the same social entities’ power ladder, or at least different rungs of that ladder, are essentially unable to objectively judge their own consent? And to put such statements under the automatic assumption, or at least suspicion, of being forced out of a power abuse? And to have corporations create instances that demand, and evaluate, and judge statements of their employees regarding their very own consent? Who is such an instance to be comprised of? Surely it would have to be some kind of ombudsperson, who stands outside that social structure as far as possible, while necessarily still being somehow connected to it?
So if that is the case, how does “applying” to that social entity for an “exception” and “disclosing” a relationship solve the problem? Applying and disclosing doesn’t make a power gap go away. What it does is to humiliate the participants, who have to - figuratively - pull down their underpants in front of their employer. How does one apply for such an exception? Is there a formalized process? Sorry, dumb question, it is a multinational corporation, of course there’s a formalized process. Is there a standard form? Does it have checkboxes for romantic interactions? Or do you have to sit on a little bench in front of the ombudsperson’s office, and when you are called in, talk to them how you french kissed the VP of sales after the last Christmas party, but then they never answered your texts? If you “apply” for something, surely it can be denied, how does that work?
OK I get that, but my experience with corporate bureaucracy is not exactly that the rules within it have the effect of protecting the lower-downs from the higher-ups. They do have the effect of impinging on your freedom of choice, in particular when arrogating to regulate your out-of-work behavior. And they tend to be leveraged by whoever is in a better position to leverage corporate rules.
their judgement is not the issue, it is the leverage of power and how that is abused very frequently.
have you really never worked for a company with HR? They usually have policies about the who and how in these situations where protections are required for safety. you can inquire to learn more. they usually have education material on why such policies are important.
by putting it out in the open, where power can’t be leveraged for harm, obviously.
it is great you are just starting to think these things out. i’m not the only source of information. these are well established protections that are becoming universal for very good reasons.
if you don’t feel such protections are necessary you obviously have never been pressured or assaulted by a superior in the workplace. just because you don’t understand the hows and whys yet doesn’t mean they aren’t critical for a safe healthy workplace, they truly are.
that’s exactly how these rules work and are structured. protecting lower downs from higher ups specifically, not the other way around.
maybe the people you work with are part of work and how you treat them, even on off hours effects work? any interactions you have with co-workers even off hours does affect the workplace.
the rules don’t say anything about what you can do with non co-workers, they are work specific.
Sometimes true, and certainly he had no business in any actual consensual relationship with his subordinates (or superiors for that matter), but Delmar Simpson was convicted of 18 counts of rape. There are no consensual rapes by definition.
ETA: Just so I’m clear, your point is valid even though your example is inaccurately remembered.
I find people’s general position on this issue rather hard to square with the usual reaction to such things. What if the headline were “McDonalds fires burger flipper over relationship with her manager”? Of course that would probably not be deemed newsworthy enough for us to know about it.
I don’t think it’s hard to square at all. First of all, it matters that the person who lost their job is already rich as hell. The harm done to them is nothing like the harm done to a person working for minimum wage.
Second, it matters that the person who lost their job was the more senior of the people involved. Firing a burger flipper for a relationship with the manager would be perverse. Firing a manager for a relationship with a burger flipper may end up actually being a tragic story, but it’s also a corporate policy I can support.
Third, a key point in the outrage of these things being implemented against low level employees is that we suspect that policies like this are often only for low level employees, while people high up the chain can do whatever they want. Seeing that this policy is being applied right up to the CEO level shows fairness instead of raising the suspicion on unfairness.
Humans are very good at talking about “common sense” as it should be applied by others, and very bad at applying it to their own lives, especially in romantic relationships.
In the last couple of years we have heard from many sexual harrassers who consistently tell us that they did not understand that their advances were unwanted; yet their coworkers describe feeling unable to fully reject the advances for fear of disrupting the workplace or work relationships.
Policies that set clear boundaries around relationships draw a bright lines around otherwise grey areas. It does not seem unreasonable to provide a working enviornment that is free from solicitations and their inevitable fallouts.
it is the long history of abuse that made creating such policies necessary. it is the fact that this still happens all the time today in companies that makes them still relevant and necessary. unfortunate, but protections like this have brought us a long way. i wouldn’t want to go back to pre 50’s work dynamics.
a lot of people seem to not understand the reasons for the last 70 years of progress.
Couldn’t really get much from either article because of paywall and translation issues. Looked like that company should’ve had a better succession plan. However, there are lots of advice columns regularly getting questions from people who work in family owned businesses trying to figure out how to navigate workplace issues when the person causing problems is related to (or having a relationship with) a person in authority over them. Family business sounds great on paper, but people within families don’t always get along. Add unrelated employees to the mix, and problems can quickly get worse.
I’ve worked at two family owned businesses in the past. During my first day at the largest firm, the person giving me the tour felt compelled to warn me. There was so much intermarriage and nepotism, he advised me to never say anything negative to any co-worker, because you never knew how they might be related to another employee. The owners decided to sell the company to a competitor, and the workers were traumatized. They felt betrayed because for decades the attitude was that they were all one big happy family. I’d been working as a contractor for years, and learned never to rely on any employer, so it was an odd experience watching people practically rending their shirts and wailing in conference rooms.
The important thing to remember is to follow good business rules and practices, regardless of the family relationship. Otherwise, you make a mess and probably don’t handle either one very well.
Sure, they usually have an ombudsperson in place to whom you can confidentially apply if there is a problem. And it is usually stressed everybody can, and should appeal to them confidentially, whenever they feel there might be a problem of abuse of any sort.
… but mandatory disclosure, before any participant even feels the need to report an issue - that is an entirely different ballgame, is it not? I don’t think any “education” will convince me that is a reasonable way to have adults deal with their private versus workplace life. My employer owns my worktime, and I owe them to conduct myself in a legal and socially acceptable manner. If I were to fail in that regard, a notified ombudsperson would see to it that the company acts appropriately.
But I don’t owe them a forehanded account of my private relationships, the motivation for them to have in the first place surely is not only their concern for their employee’s welfare, but to legally insure themselves against any trouble a less than social person might cause down the road.
Doesn’t a power imbalance exist not only within an organization, but first and foremost between the organization as a whole, and a working individual who has to sell their time to them in order to gain their livelihood? Please don’t tell me that you can not see, how one could think the latter model is an overreach of this power.
it is the long history of abuse that made creating such policies necessary. it is the fact that this still happens all the time today in companies that makes them still relevant and necessary. unfortunate, but protections like this have brought us a long way. i wouldn’t want to go back to pre 50’s work dynamics.
