New-ish "free speech" app, Parler

Politics & Elections
361

That’s your distinction. I think it’s fair to say that a Republican employer might have a slightly different place to draw the line. Once the precedent has been set that it’s good and normal to base hiring and firing decisions on someone’s politics, do you really think they are going to care where you personally draw the line?

Also, cancel culture has been going after plenty of people for mundane political beliefs, starting with James Damore. One of the reasons CEOs have been moving companies out of Silicon Valley is the uniculture and hostile, activist work forces in the region.

362

Not really. Like most things that businesses do, it’s about maximizing profit. The “activism” aspect is something that most of these tech companies already comply with; they’re not moving in order to have the freedom to hire more Trumpists, they’re moving in order to make more money for their executives.

363

Yes, because no one but you is advocating firing people merely for political views. We’re talking about Trumpists, people who still actively and publicly support a man who tried to overthrow our government.

Yes, some who want to support that fascism may try to act like kicking out a liberal is equivalent. But I don’t think that would last. Middle management doing so would mean upper management would shut them down. The top has every reason to not want to hire Trumpers since they tend to cause strife and enjoy hurting people, but little reason to not hire Democrats.

We’re not talking about people who disagree on taxes, immigration policy, roles of government, or any of the normal stuff that people disagree on in a democracy. We’re talking about people who want an authoritarian government and are willing to try and override the will of the people to do so, or are easily tricked by those who have those goals.

Should it be the only factor? No. It depends on how deep the support goes. But no one wants to be the company that hired the guy who attacks the Capitol, marches in Nazi parades, defends hate crimes, says racist garbage publicly, and so on. And a Trump supporter is more likely to do that.

Not taking into account someone’s public support for Trump is bad for business.

364

And all they need after that is for the members of this Board to bring them the SDMB experience! That’ll larn 'em!

365

A common but ultimately false shibboleth. With, per RW standard, just a small nugget of truth in the center to be crowed about while ignoring the much larger rest of the story which demonstrates the opposite conclusion.

Small businesses continuously go into and out of business. The right loves to count all the jobs created as these businesses open. But completely forgets to count the jobs lost when they close. D’oh!

The whole truth is there is little to no net growth in small business employment. But there is vast churn in these very unstable jobs.

The overall level of employment ebbs and flows with the economic cycle. Both large and small businesses are subject to that. But small biz (including the most numerous type, the 1 man “business” that never grows to get even a single employee) has a much larger beta. On the way up and even more so on the way down.

366

@Sam_Stone @Kimstu

Broadly speaking, I don’t imagine an outspoken conservative would be comfortable in a workplace owned by outspoken liberals.

On the other hand, I just moved from a deep blue state to a purple state. I’m coming to grips with the realization that there are a lot of companies I wouldn’t be comfortable working for because their ownership and culture is so Trumpian. A family member of mine works for one such company, a construction company that has big American flag designs painted on their trucks - although lately the drivers are concerned that the flag design makes them vulnerable to attacks by “antifa” and no, I’m not making that up.

My cousin is having a problem with the political views of the company, and he considers himself “conservative”. But one day he was totally freaked out because although he was OK with a little bit of …liberal tears LOL yuck yuck…workplace dialogue, he realized his coworkers really hated liberals and wished them all dead, and it sort of scared him, because he’s really young and a total Boy Scout.
So, yeah, I don’t think they would hire me, and if I decide to work again this might be a problem for me since my work is closely tied to the construction industry.

So don’t claim it’s a one way thing. I’m sure liberals face the same challenges of personal politics when seeking employment in construction or manufacturing as conservatives do when seeking employment in design, engineering, administration or science.

So any perception that this kind of “discrimination” hurts conservatives most is probably because the liberals dominate the fields with good jobs that require critical thinking skills. You might want to ask yourselves why that is.

But I never could have hired anyone that supported Trump for any job of significance. Maybe I might have hired a Trump supporter to lug boxes or lift heavy things as long as he wasn’t obnoxiously outspoken.

My business had a large number of New York real estate moguls and companies as clients. I expect anyone in any position of significance to know the specifics of our local market, in deep detail. That includes knowing which companies are commonly known to be honest actors and which companies aren’t. If someone working in sales or accounting lacks the knowledge and discernment to assess the honesty and good faith of a potential client, that results in an unacceptable financial risk.

Anyone close to NY real estate knows that The Trump Organization and Donald Trump are dirty and don’t act in good faith. Even if they aren’t aware of specifics, their business methods and organizational structure is not that of a fully legitimate business.

Anyone with the experience to work for me that was a Trump supporter either had a blind spot towards people like Trump or a general lack of discernment, both which would be disqualifying. The business was the also the target of lots of scams and I would never knowingly hire anyone that had fallen for a con artist for any job that required brains.

Now…maybe I’m being too harsh on the average red state rube, who is just a simple minded everyman that sees no reason to distrust every big city billionaire that claims to care about him and thinks if he gives Donald Trump $35,000, Donald Trump will tell him how to get rich quick. But I don’t think so.

367

That was most of my life… until I started working for “creative” companies.

But I found that once I actually got to know the managers and factory guys (who had flags and Republican bumper stickers on their trucks), they were decent folk and we shared a lot of values. BUT this was a while ago, and these were Reagan/George HW Bush Conservatives.

I often wonder if they drifted more Trumpian with the party, or stayed “Small Gummint”, UNLIKE the so-called Conservatives of today.

368

This may be true in many cases (though personally, I’ve had numerous comfortable and respectful conversations with outspoken (though rational) conservatives in deep-blue academia). But I don’t think that in and of itself it would be an adequate reason for refusing to hire a rational conservative. Employees are expected to conduct themselves in accordance with company policies about not making other people uncomfortable, but their own levels of discomfort with their work environment are for them to assess.

This is probably more true nowadays than it used to be, at least within large companies. There are probably still plenty of small- to medium companies run and staffed by well-compensated conservatives whose critical thinking skills are functioning fine in most of everyday life, except for a massive cognitive dissonance in processing facts about politics and science.

My objection to arguments that those conservatives shouldn’t be discriminated against in hiring is that it’s really hard to tell how effectively somebody has compartmentalized their irrationality. Hypothetical company-owner me could hire a Trumpist who seems to be normally functioning on workplace matters, only to discover that, say, he was too terrified to visit a supplier in a downtown area because he believes (falsely) that the area’s been taken over by murderous anarchist antifa and BLM rioters and what not. If I have a choice, I want an employee without obvious gaping holes in their rational thought processes.

369

AFAICT, conservatives’ concern about “people getting fired for their political beliefs” is of fairly recent origin, following the abovementioned cultural shift towards more liberal-style corporate attitudes among many big companies.

Back when business as a whole was stereotypically associated with conservatism, the standard image of “political workplace discrimination” was a Democrat getting fired for having a John Kerry bumper sticker on their car, or for heckling Bush at a political rally. And the standard conservative view of such situations was “too bad, you’re free to go work for somebody else who doesn’t mind that behavior, or to stop engaging in that behavior”.

Now that it’s conservative employees who are potentially more at risk from employers’ political biases—both because employers are now less reliably conservative in their biases and because conservative viewpoints have got way more nutty and extremist than liberal ones—conservatives are starting to feel very concerned about the unfairness of somebody “getting fired for their political beliefs”. Even if those “political beliefs” involve outright irrational delusions about reality or advocacy of terrorism.

370

The same goes for hiring an outspoken Christian (or a “Militant Atheist”; I worked with one of those). The best workplaces I’ve been in have kept politics and religion on the down low.

I had an woman who was interviewing me ask about the fact that I’d been a youth minister. Sensing what her real question was, I took a chance and said "Well, hopefully nobody will be able to tell. Oh, and when things get frustrating I do believe in yelling ‘Fuck this shit!’"

“Oh, good. We yell Fuck a lot, too! I was hoping you could take it.”

…

(As an aside, I had a coworker say they had no idea where I stood politically or spiritually… I was so proud of myself.)

371

So, what you’re saying is, if the Left keeps this up, the Right might… keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing my entire adult life?

Jesus, Sam, you’re a regular Nostradamus.

372

There’s also the simple fact that, in 2021, hiring a ‘Trump supporting conservative’ means hiring a person:

  1. Detached from reality
  2. Who wants to bring down the system I’m trying to build and invest into

… and who the fuck wants to pay 6 figures to a director of Ops who considers half your client base to be pedophile Satanists, who prefers to think the election was stolen rather than admitting that people decided Trump was just bad at his job**, and wants to bring down the American political system on behalf of a NYC real estate huckster married to a Communist prostitute? I don’t. Do you, Sam?

Cashier, sure. I’ll hire that person. Manager or above, no.

** … and, you know, for my director of operations, she has to make hiring/firing decisions. And if she can’t figure out that a President who cost 10,000,000 jobs, 400,000 lives, and didn’t do shit except sign the occasional EO didn’t deserve another 4 years on the job, well, that also says something about her team-building skills- she is someone who ignores factual performance and replaces it with internal, flawed, metrics.

ETA: (Thrilled that political leanings are not a protected class.)

373

Heh, my brother had a similar thing happen when interviewing for a job in Vermont. They asked him about marijuana and he could sense what they were trying to ask, so he tried to say, quickly so they’d understand both parts at the same time, “I don’t use it myself but I’m cool with it.”

374

Fact is, in the US, we have this magical thing called the secret ballot. No one is within their rights to demand to know for whom you voted, not even your (prospective) employer. You simply cannot be penalized for how you voted.

If you make an issue of it, you can be penalized for that. If you are a nuisance at work, you can be dismissed for harassing your cow-orkers. If you engage in illegal activities outside work, you can be terminated for that. The law might be slightly murkier as far as allegedly tarnishing the company image.

Businesses also have quite a lot of latitude in making hiring decisions – if an interviewer decides that you would be a net negative to a productive work environment, they are within their rights to put your CV in the bottom drawer. When it comes to personnel decisions, a fair-sized company will have a good HR department that can almost always come up with a valid reason for rejecting an applicant or dismissing an employee.

In the case of political views, as in many other cases getting fired or not hired is not somebody else’s fault, it is yours. Expressing your opinion is not a requirement of having an opinion.

375

Anyone with access to your social media, or your browsing history or purchase history or social graph can make a very good guess as to your political views (as well as many other things of interest to an employer which they should not have access to).

If you apply for a job at Google or Facebook, they undoubtedly have so much data on you that they can tell your eating and sleeping habits, political persuation, whether you are an introvert or extrovert, what your hobbies are, whether you are polite or aggressive with people, whether you are religious and what that religion might be, whether you own a gun, watch porn, support liberal or conservative causes, and about a million other characteristics. They could easily have AI’s that automatically sift your data and spit out a rating showing if you are ‘google material’.

Expect these kinds of services to be available to HR departments all over the place soon, if it isn’t already. Also coming to your health care provider, who might mot like your late-night posting habits and decide to charge you a premium or deny coverage.

376

In the US maybe. That sort of casual personal oversight is strictly illegal and culturally unthinkable here in the EU.

377

Oh well, it’d be nice to have hiring decisions based upon something that is a non-protected class rather than the traditional conservative hiring procedure which is,

1)Do they have a funny sounding name
2)Do they look too Jewish
3)Do they look too black
4)Do they set off my gaydar
5)Are they people who have a differant political outlook to my own
6)Do they live in a neighbourhood where lots of the previously identified categories also live
7) Last of all, are they qualified and likely to be competent and capable of the duties for which they are applying

If as a company you decide to recruit on the typical ruby red recruiting credentials, or if you cannot attract a recruitment pool from the widest source, you are eventually going to be outcompeted by this companies who do, becuase they have a wider choice of talent.

Worth thinking about if you are a rabid rightist.

378

Someone who uses “password” as their password has given ample reason (i.e. rank stupidity) not to hire them even before looking at the actual content made publicly available by that dubious decision.

379

You think Google and facebook need your password to access your personal data? It’s on their servers. Do you have any idea how much of this data is already being sold to anyone who wants to buy it? To date the main purchasers of that data have been advertising firms. But there is no reason a company can’t buy it, use it to decide whether to hire you, and then tell you the reason they didn’t hire you was something more mundane, such as another candidate being a ‘better fit’. You’ll never know that the real reason is because a facial recognition algorithm spotted you at a BLM rally, and the company doesn’t want to hire ‘troublemakers’.

Then wait until you get turned down for health insurance because a ratings agency gave you an ‘f’ based on the foods you buy, how much sleep you get, and your troubling tendency to google about various medical symptoms that might indicate less than stellar health.

380

No one forces you to have a FB or Twitter account. In fact, if you want to be obnoxious, you can use an account that cannot be identified as you, and the gestapo will never figure out it is actually you, if you know what you are doing (though the FBI might). If you maintain innocent-face accounts with your own name on them and do your nasty talk on obscure accounts, you should be fine. If you have to be an asshole up front, you get what you deserve.