That’s not honestly what we’re talking about in this thread.
We’re talking about relationships where there’s a routine possibility that one person has a power-based relationship with the other. And having some way of ensuring it’s not routine sexual harassment instead of just relying on a boss to do the right thing by a less-powered direct subordinate.
We’re not talking about your boss making you “involuntarily celibate” in your personal life.
By offering and promoting anonymous and independent channels for complaint and counseling? Instead of putting such a relationship under the a priori suspicion of being illicit, and threatening termination to anyone who can’t bring themselves to discuss it, of all people, with Jamie from HR, and put it into writing?
How so? Citation needed.
But that still wouldn’t be a rule made by the employer, would it?
They have to take measures to prevent sexual harassment, to help victims, to punish perpetrators. I fail to see where they are required to prevent relationships between employees, or where they are even granted the right to do so.
Employees here can do lots of things that they can’t do in America, but of course not everything:
Let’s assume the employee is a volunteer for the local soccer club and takes bribes related to that. The employer can likely argue that the the employee cannot be considered to be trustworthy anymore and dismiss them. This might not apply if the employee’s job is so low-level that this kind of trust is not required.
European law tends to be much more aggressive at outlawing hate speech than US law is. So if someone is caught going to an actual Nazi meeting, they’re out of a job and in deep trouble with the law. Things like the Westboro Baptist Church would be illegal too.
But a regular everyone-knows-it’s-a-hate-group-but-not-according-to-the-letter-of-the-law kind of meeting? That’s your freedom of speech, and your employer has no right to interfere with it. The same law will protect you if you’re a communist and your employer isn’t, if your employer is afraid that “The Nation” will be “destroyed” by the “influx” of people from “inferior cultures” and you are campaigning for… well… humanity.
Unless it’s after you stop working for your present company, in which case it’s a solid maybe. Non-compete clauses exist but are more limited and harder to enforce than in America.
Harass a fellow employee: No. That’s a crime.
Harass an employee who works under you: No. That’s even more of a crime.
Neglect your duties as an employee because you are in love with another employee or a subordinate: No. That’s neglecting your duties as an employee.
Fall in love with, marry, or start a family with a fellow employee, a subordinate or a superior: Yes.
If you manage to avoid the three previous points, there is nothing wrong with it. In bigger companies, your superiors might try to restructure the team structure to prevent you from being the direct superior of your lover for much longer though, to prevent future problems.
Yes and no. You can’t talk about one without talking about the other. We’re talking about preventing harassment/abuse of power by making rules restricting “relationships at work”, i.e. banning a good thing (“love”), in order to prevent a bad thing (“harassment”). Whether that’s worth it in this particular case, is a culture-relative judgement call and not something universally obvious.
EU OSH R198
Citation needed.
That is not how these rules work at all, and no one is banning love. That’s a strawman setup to argue against protecting people in the workplace. 
Please tell me you didn’t just post a [Citation Needed] to a post that actually provided the citation in the post?
“Love” is not being banned by asking workers to say which direct subordinates they’re romantically/sexually involved with.
Not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about disclosing relationships, not banning them.
Which is only possible if there’s disclosure of the relationship. The thing you’re arguing isn’t necessary.
Not everyone who smokes or is exposed to second-hand smoke will get lung cancer. But enough do that we have created strict rules about who is allowed to smoke where.
Not every workplace relationship where one has power or authority over another is harassment. But enough are that rules are in place. The other point people seem to be missing is it can also create percieved favoritism or real favoritism – or stall a career if the one with authority is studiously trying to avoid appearing partisan.
Then there is the reality that relationships end and what started as consensual and non-harassment doesn’t always stay that way. Not to mention the stress this now puts on all other coworkers.
Nobody is saying ban all human interaction we’re saying that “there is a known history of these things being harmful and not just to the direct individuals involved so companies are taking steps to prevent harm.”
If it’s really “all parties fully consensually twu wuv” like some posters are claiming us attacking, then they will find a solution that actually works. It won’t require weakening of anti-harassment rules to do so.
I honestly did not find anything in the post that explained how/where exactly European OSH legislation gave employers the right to ban relationships between employees. The linked article only mentioned that employers must take measures to prevent harassment, but did not specify if employers got any additional rights to help them implement those measures. So I asked, and I got a response (“R198”) that I still need to google.
True. I’m afraid we’re talking about different things at the same time.
I don’t know the legality (here in Austria) of requiring employees to disclose relationships, it’s generally considered good practice though.
We really weren’t talking about the same thing.
In the article summary given on BB, all I saw was “I engaged in a recent consensual relationship with an employee, which violated McDonald’s policy”, which sounds like banning relationships, period. The original FT article is behind a paywall.
Then:
To which a reply was:
redesigned then mentioned responsible disclosure processes, but as a way to get an exception to a rule. I just chimed in to report that no such consensus exists on the other end of the world and that companies don’t have the right to make a rule that would require exceptions in this case.
So all the time, I was talking about rules that tell employees who they are allowed to date. The internet tells me such rules are quite common in the US. Personal experience tells me that they are unheard of in Austria.
The 2005 Walmart court case in Germany which I referred to was also about a rule banning all relationships between employees.
I just came back from three weeks of vacation and I still have two weeks left. I did not have to negotiate for this right, every employee gets it. Is that proof enough? Okay that’s a different subject. And before you ask, I’m also sure that employees in the US can do many things that we can’t do here, but I was responding to a specific question.
That doesn’t mean all relationships are banned, it means he had a consensual relationship that had some quality that was covered by policy. That could have been not reporting it, or it being a more-clearly coercive relationship where there was still some “consent”.
He said it was wrong and a mistake and against policy he agreed with. People are defending his right to do something he said was wrong and unethical.
these aren’t laws in the US, it’s generally considered good practice to have rules that protect your employees in place though.
Except that wasn’t correct and is not helpful.
They not only have the right they have the responsibility and are highly encouraged to*.
European Labour Law Network (ELLN) REGULATING THE EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP
IN EUROPE (2006) (yet another source)
Just in case anyone feels like they are screaming into a void, I think the conversation in this thread has been great. I was never going to be convinced that a policy like the McDonald’s one is a bad policy to have right now. Still, I’m left feeling like the truth has to synthesize things that people who disagree are saying.
My feeling is that we excuse people (and I mostly mean men) far too much for acting on their feelings. And I don’t mean just romantic feelings, but any kind of feelings. Like we all ought to be able to say, “Yeah, I feel this way, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to do that thing.” So often when people talk about sexual harassment there is someone who will say something like, “But what if I see someone I find really attractive on the subway, what’s an appropriate way to approach them?” and they don’t get that in many circumstances that answer might be, “Just don’t, just suffer through the bad feeling of longing.” The hardest part of dealing with a culture of sexual harassment and rape is that we need to deal with the implicit undercurrent that women are grown ups who are responsible for everyone’s emotions and men are children who can’t be expected to do any better.
Mostly my reaction to “what if people genuinely fall in love and there is a corporate policy that could get them fired for it,” is, “Gee, sounds like you’ve got a grown-up decision to make!” But I admit that I shouldn’t assume without real evidence that a corporate policy is doing anything to stop harassment. It’s quite possible that store managers harassing and assaulting employees goes on unabated while the policy against it was used against the CEO just as an excuse to cover some other intrigue (or because their lover was a man or was trans or was something else that people thought would be embarrassing to the company).
Based on these policies and how they are being applied, my opening statement holds…just don’t “date” anyone you work with. There are too many negative consequences and paths from doing so and people are better off seeking romance elsewhere.
And this is due to terrible behavior by men of harassment and exclusionary practices in the workplace. I agree with your post above wherein the policies are there to protect people and that is a good thing, but a shame when it has unintended negative consequences for others.
Yeah, I think that’s fair. I think the responses you got to that were kind of negative as if you were implying something else. But I think that this is not a good time in history to be dating co-workers. And I agree that’s not a great place for us to be, but I think people misidentify the problem. The problem is that we have a culture that systematically justifies rape and there is no easy way to dig ourselves out from under that. Previously we expected the victims of those rapes to shoulder the full burden of that problem. Now we expect people who miss a real love connection with a co-worker to shoulder a little bit of that burden. I’m not looking to date any co-workers so I guess I shouldn’t be speaking for others, but it does seem fair that we all pitch in.
Also, somehow this whole conversation makes me think of the old Simpsons episode where they flashback to the founding of Springfield and Shelbyville and it shows the settlers arriving and saying, “We can live freely, govern justly… and marry our cousins”. “Why would we want to marry our cousins?” “Because they’re so attractive!” (I realize that might sound like I’m putting down people who want to date their co-workers, which I’m not, I just imagine someone saying, “Because they’re so attractive!” and it makes me laugh.)
There may be a bit of a misapprehension here.
The CEO of McDonald’s could have developed a work relationship, he just did it in a way that he agreed wasn’t ethical.
Nobody stopped the CEO of McDonald’s from marrying his true love.
This story is not that “All consensual relationships aren’t allowed at McDonald’s”. It’s that this one crossed an ethical line somehow, as he admitted himself.
We don’t know the details, but the “consensual” part wasn’t the problem. (We also really only have his word on it that it even was consensual, but that’s a whole other thing.)
No, I’m speaking in generalities about the existence of policies like this one in workplaces and how. They may interfere with someone’s life because that’s what policies do, but I don’t think anyone is being asked to carry an unfair share of the horror of our culture of mass rape by them.
In the specific instance of this CEO being fired my bet is still that the relationship is only a fragment of the picture because I just don’t actually believe a big corporation would enforce a policy like this on a CEO. But if they really did I’m super happy about it.
But we don’t know the specifics of this policy, or how he contravened it.
Everyone rushed to paint this as “Feminist culture gone overboard” (not you, but the general thread) when it could have been a lot of different problems. Like: “He was caught consensually sleeping with someone’s wife and agreed to step down.” or “He was in a consensual relationship with a person and fired her when the relationship ended, got caught, and agreed to step down.” or half a dozen other scenarios, none of which involve “People not being allowed to have fun because the company has banned love.”
This is why Harry Stonecipher left Boeing the 2nd time. To be fair to him he got pulled back in after he already left from an I am really done with this resignation after his successor left. He was already in the middle of a divorce and legally separated and I am guessing he didn’t mind getting told to resign for it as he really didn’t want to be there in the first place.
Of course the rest of us had to take even more ethics training every year thanks to that.
That can be hard to do when you live in a world that constantly reinforces your feelings of entitlement to whatever you want in a million different ways. Doubly so when women are social conditioned to feel like our proper role in society is to constantly yield to that desire, out of kindness, out of fear, out of obligation… We’re supposed to feel like a man coming up to us in a subway and hitting on us proves our worth and value to society, and that even if that advance is not wanted or welcomed, we should still feel flattered. Even if it turns into stalking and violence, we should be flattered, because that right there illustrates our worth to society.
Spot on. We MAKE men feel a certain way by looking a way that they enjoy, and hence it’s OUR obligation to deal with that as best we can. This can and is backed up by threat of violence.
Yes, there is. We have to work at it, but the humanization of women is a critical project that can transform the world. Some men are on board with that, others are not.
Some laws interfere with people’s lives. They limit what we can or can’t do. Drug laws are a good example of that. In some (and in that case) the laws should probably be changed. Other laws should not be. If we want to live in a society that gives us some real advantages as a species (development of culture, labor saving devices, etc), I think we end up giving some of our autonomy as individuals. That should not be oppressive. But saying (as a cultural practice and in some cases as a set of laws/policies, that ban rape and discrimination for example) that men need to treat women like people instead of objects to project their lust and insecurities onto is not oppressive. If there are men who find such things oppressive, they really need to look at themselves a bit more and change something about how they view women.
Someone always does, unfortunately…
But again, I’m always a little bit like, “Was that really why, though?” I’m not going down any deep conspiracy rabbit holes, just imagining that firings at that level are about whether the people on the board like you more than anything else. Still, I admit it’s possible they were really fired for the reasons they say. I’ll just never know.
Indeed! This, to me, is the deep cultural conflict that people don’t want to face and so we end up having proxy wars about whether or not to play Baby It’s Cold Outside on the radio.
Yeah, I don’t mean to say that it’s a bad thing that a policy or a law limits us, and I know that when I use a word like “limit” it might be loaded with meaning that I don’t intend to convey. Laws against murder limit your range of options for the day, but we all agree they ought to be limited in that way, that’s why we have that law.
The reason I said:
I can’t argue against the plain facts that: 1. policies like this may interfere with people’s personal lives; 2. interfering with people’s personal lives is prima facie bad. So instead I want to move on directly to what the exact harms of a policy like this might be, what the benefits might be, and how those weigh against each other. Basically I want to put “women living in a culture that systematically condones, encourages and facilitates rape” vs. “men living in a culture that systematically makes them occasionally feel a little bad” on the scales and see whether anyone wants to argue that we really ought to consider the latter to be an important consideration.
I think like this automatically and any time you’ve ever seen me show something that looked like compassion or understanding it was probably just what seemed to me to be a way to hurt the feelings of someone I disagreed with, and probably all of my posts should be flagged for being monstrous. That, of course, isn’t true but I often feel like it is.
