I guess maybe I’m lucky (or isolationist? idk) that I’ve never felt forced to buy coffee, or cookies, or avon, or to wear black socks. My office is fairly casual in dress and attitude (we have an employee club that, for the low price of $10/mo allows us to wear jeans to work). There are plenty of expecting/existing mothers, but they kinda have their own cult of child-bearing that not every female has to be a part of. And there’s a big United Way campaign every year, but there’s no way to know for sure who has or has not donated. I donated like 2 bucks a paycheck to them my first year, because I wanted and could afford to, but never since then and I don’t feel like it’s affected me in any way.
If I started working at a place that required these kinds of contributions, I wouldn’t last very long there.
My husband’s company breaks down the United Way donations by department, and he has been the single hold-out that was preventing his department from getting to 100% participation (and the prizes that they would get for that - the usual junk). Not only did they invade his privacy by telling multiple layers of management that he had not donated, but all those layers of management did their best to pressure him to be a team player and just donate some money already - you don’t want to ruin it for everyone, do you? Well, as a matter of fact, we hate the United Way and the way they do business, and we will never willingly support it. We have our own charities that we donate to throughout the year for our own reasons, and none of this is his company’s business.
