Turning Corporations Touchy-Feely, cont.page 2
Corporations hyper-control their working environments. No knives, pepper spray canisters or stun guns in evidence, no voodoo dolls or photographs of barely dressed men or women on the cube shelves; no Native American figurines with arrows through their heads; no novelty fake poo, no reference to masturbation. Sexist rap music must not be audible or intentionally shared. There can be no hidden cameras catching other employees in private or embarrassing poses, violent video games on media players during an employee’s lunch hour, gambling or fantasy sport playing, no peanut or nut products to which fellow employees may have allergies, no sexual contact in the workplace, no live pets, no e-mails of a sexual nature, no background checks by employees on other employees or management, no display of any nation’s flags, no display of tattoos of one’s sexual orientation or fetishes or gang affiliation, no use of nonprescribed illicit medications or drinking of alcoholic beverages, no taunting language or negative references to another employee’s abilities, no parodies of another employee’s personality quirks or physical mannerisms, no peer-on-peer harassment based on the peer’s embarrassing past act, no bullying, no making fun of any disorder whether or not there’s an employee with that disorder such as ADHD, dyslexia, etc., no statement that could conceivably lower a colleague’s self-esteem, and no talk of contentious issues like abortion, religion, politics, and the Kardashians.
And by no means can anyone say cunt or write cunt or silently mouth the syllable while pointing to a cunt, even their own.
Any situation or substance or scene that could conceivably be a matter of personal taste can cause a conflict, and management want to prohibit such individuality.
Managing conflict between employees, which often boils down to creating temporary solutions to minimize potential negative effects, is a major area of corporate strategy implementation. For example, one employee’s been at the company or in the department longer, so he thinks he should have the power to make decisions in his own job, but another employee has a more important title and thinks he can tell others how they should do their jobs, and do them more efficiently or with better quality or greater proactive initiative or more focus on customer orientation, substituting his own judgment for the judgment of others and micromanaging their tasks. Some employees don’t react well to stress, or their attitudes and values clash with the personalities of others, or they’re just rude and aggressive and pessimistic and contrary. Under the best conditions, there are communication breakdowns that cause interpretive conflict and disagreements over the delegation of responsibility.
Sometimes, managing or even resolving conflict involves preventing it through a corporate culture of enforced intrapersonal niceness. Everybody plays nicely, and nobody gets hurt. Everybody’s voice is heard, and everybody feels valued. If anyone feels bad, managers counsel those who ruffled the feelings rather than hold the emotionally sensitive weeper responsible for his own psychic pain. (People who emote and point a finger of blame at others enjoy the protective label of victim, though the tactic is obviously diversionary.)
Such pacification–holding one person responsible for another’s feelings–though irrational, is embraced by corporations. Managers hope that sensitivity training in sexual harassment, multicultural diversity, emotional fragility, and political correctness and euphemistic language will bring awareness of the emphasis that a company places on defusing tensions, and consequently, complying with government mandates.
Companies have methods of airing grievances privately
with management, and management determines who is ultimately at fault for the
tension between the employees. Always at fault: the rational employee, the
rebel, the maverick, the demander of personal accountability, the one who
refuses to bend to the team’s goals.
The rational employee holds people responsible
to both their job duties and their emotional states. He understands that
emotions and perceptions can’t be objectively measured, and neither can the
truth in reports that another employee’s feelings have been hurt. He knows that
freedom of speech is an illusion in corporations, which is why he often
withholds comments, because his indignation is not a happy feeling; he’s not
inappropriately positive and that puts a big bulls eye on his back.
In every social gathering, there are babies, and then there are BIG babies. It’s part of a manager’s job to treat adults like babies, presuming that all are too weak to fend for themselves or to parry negative comments or respectfully disagree and negotiate compromises.
This treatment of adults like children is the first of many
condescending insults that management heaps on its employees.
The stated goal of corporate- and government-mandated
sensitivity training is to make employees aware and sympathetic regarding the
special histories that different minorities, traditionally disenfranchised
groups, and handicapped employees may have. It’s best in casual conversation
among employees not to bring up certain issues if those who belong to a targeted
group are in hearing range.
Making all personal topics off limits is insult
number 2. Such a policy denies individuality and a sense of identity. Forcing
proscribed robotic responses is not a morale booster.
Homogenization of topics considered acceptable and
appropriate among adults in the workplace has unintended consequences. Making
all employees aware (and re-aware) of the fact that certain racial and gender
stereotypes exist now leads to suspicion about a coworker’s motivations or
intentions when he takes home the collage of watermelon seeds his daughter made
in art class, or when he comments about a black male colleague’s large feet or
mentions that his Asian wife doesn’t have a drivers license.
Sensitivity courses that focus on tiptoeing around
the topic of race are racist because they presume generalities about personality
based on race, such as, a minority will get upset if you talk about percentages
of blacks in prison or bean burritos causing intestinal instability.
Employees on their lunch hour should be able to discuss abortion, immigration, racial quotas, foreign policy, and the National Endowment of the Arts, for example, without fear that managers will step in to protect, by uninvited proxy, the feelings of women, foreigners, Blacks, Israelis, or artists who might also be in the room, thereby preventing potential dissention.
You can’t talk about an elder employee’s slipping memory or slow pace because it’ll hurt his feelings, even if you’re not someone against whom he can claim age discrimination, since he already has the job and you’re not his manager.
Or about fat people or short people or fashion-challenged people or people of cross-eyed descent.
If you want, you’re allowed to complain about other employees who wear too much cologne or perfume, and you can claim that the scent aggravates your allergies. Employees pit one sensitivity against another, and management wastes time addressing every complaint.
The political correctness agenda is the indoctrination of pluralism and diversity based on physical characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and gender and the use of an artificial lexicon as a means to eliminate racism and sexism. Sort of like fighting fire with fire, but it’s just that much harder to forget how hot it’s getting in such a fight.
Censure of politically incorrect language presumes that
there are both approved and unapproved ideas and ways of expressing oneself
about those ideas. Political correctness emphasizes conformity in thought
and the devaluation and replacement of original, creative, free thinking. The
corporation selects what views you can voice and how you may voice them. Any
idea deemed to be incorrect is not discussed, only dismissed as inappropriate,
while no conversation is permitted about why such topics have been determined to
be inappropriate.
The tedium and blandness of using only the nonoffensive term, chest, for instance, when referring to women’s breasts stifles and suffocates the vibrant life of daily colloquial language. A broad range of terms, words, ideas, points of view, and activities are officially forbidden by managers, punishable as though they were threatening behavior aimed at invoking a violent response, because the words could be interpreted by some loose bolts in the drawer in ways that cause companies risk for lawsuits.
A corporation that wants to identify the employees who need sensitivity indoctrination should encourage idiots to “open up” about niggers and Jews-bastards and cunts, not steam silently.
Sensitivity training may actually promote
discrimination lawsuits. If a company’s presumptive position is to avoid
lawsuits, then hiring fewer minorities and women and the physically challenged
could be said to cut their risk. The heightened awareness to the feelings of
protected classes of employees also risks an anti-PC backlash among the muzzled
employees, breeding intolerance and the urge to repress minorities and women
surreptitiously.
Ironically, the entrenchment of homogenization
training and limits on employee speech is a defense against discrimination
lawsuits. The programs demonstrate to government regulators a pattern of
concerted, collective corporate effort to prevent bad behavior in its employees.
Systematic deprogramming also repairs a poor public image and makes the
corporation appear socially conscientious. It’s a tradeoff.
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