How do you end 'cancel culture'?

[Lexicus]

I've seen plenty of it in my time in leftist spaces. "agree with this specific position or you're not a proper leftist". It's unnecessary. You don't need it to make an effective argument.

I'm not sure it's about making an effective argument. It's more like, I'm not going to waste my time arguing with someone who isn't already enough on my side to be persuadable.

Sometimes it's calling out people saying bad things. Are you saying we shouldn't have that?

Clearly, I am not. I believe in freedom of speech, after all. But not all ways of calling people out are created equal, and I would say that sometimes calling out the bad things people say doesn't accomplish anything except making the people doing the calling out feel good.

And this is without touching my entire point about what happens to intolerable people being kept in an organisation? What happens to other workers? We need an answer to that.

Does a thirty-second video of someone's conduct really provide clear evidence that they are a toxic personality creating an unacceptable environment for coworkers?

There is no concrete "we need X and Y". It's just using leftists displaying a lack of sympathy for racists as a strawman to imply that they don't believe in worker protections. And I'm tired of seeing it.

I have seen people in Facebook groups I am in literally conspire to get people fired. They do this mostly over social media posts they find, I'm not really sure where.
The content of these posts is very often completely reprehensible, but to say that this behavior is inconsistent with support for worker rights is simply pointing out a fact.

And why are we stuck debating an already-agreed goal of worker protections?

tl;dr: if you want to make it harder to fire people, including racists, you also need to have a plan to protect people in these workplaces, from the racists that you've made more difficult to fire. You can't do one without the other.

Pretty clearly because we do not have real agreement on the issue of worker protections.

Seriously, let's say we were talking about the right to a fair trial, and you said "well if we give everyone fair trials how will we protect people from racists we could otherwise summarily throw into jail or execute?" Would it be accurate to say that you do not really support the principle that people deserve fair trials?

Yeah, well, I guess I'm not as concerned about Twitter as the rest of you.

I am not particularly concerned with Twitter, but I am concerned that many people seem to think mob behavior on Twitter is political activity advancing some sort of worthwhile goal. I also find this funny given that activity on Twitter is itself often the transgression for which the racists are being fired.

 

[Gorbles]

I'm not sure it's about making an effective argument. It's more like, I'm not going to waste my time arguing with someone who isn't already enough on my side to be persuadable.

Same difference. "on my side" here is doing a lot of work, because all of this is just leftist squabbling (to the eyes of the forum at least). That said, at the very least, if that's the way this is going to be presented, don't get all mad when people say you're not a proper leftist for whatever reason, then. I don't like any of it, right? "X isn't a proper leftist" is leftist purity politics and has been for the better part of a decade I've been involved in such (and yeah, I know, that's not a long time in the grand scale of things. I'm just trying to demonstrate I'm not going on six months of following a handful of people on Twitter kind of thing).

Your time is your own, for sure. If you feel that this is futile, that is entirely fair. I've quit discussions for similar reasons. But you can also do that without making targeting criticism of who is or isn't a proper leftist.

Clearly, I am not. I believe in freedom of speech, after all. But not all ways of calling people out are created equal, and I would say that sometimes calling out the bad things people say doesn't accomplish anything except making the people doing the calling out feel good.

Sometimes you would be correct. But sometimes you would not. The problem is with these unilateral judgments on the entire concept is you (or TF, or whoever) has reduced it down to should this happen, or should this not happen at all. You've reduced it to a binary just because of the "collateral damage" as you put it. I'm trying to explore the collateral damage of these callouts not resulting in (actually) toxic people being fired. Which is relatively easily done because we have so many existing, ongoing examples.

Does a thirty-second video of someone's conduct really provide clear evidence that they are a toxic personality creating an unacceptable environment for coworkers?

It entirely depends on the video, but I wasn't exactly trying to debate a singular example. The woman I was referencing, I was only referencing because she wasn't even fired.

I have seen people in Facebook groups I am in literally conspire to get people fired. They do this mostly over social media posts they find, I'm not really sure where.
The content of these posts is very often completely reprehensible, but to say that this behavior is inconsistent with support for worker rights is simply pointing out a fact.

And the behaviour you're describing is problematic. But please don't project that onto places that are calling out people with evidence in good faith, thanks.

Pretty clearly because we do not have real agreement on the issue of worker protections.

Seriously, let's say we were talking about the right to a fair trial, and you said "well if we give everyone fair trials how will we protect people from racists we could otherwise summarily throw into jail or execute?" Would it be accurate to say that you do not really support the principle that people deserve fair trials?

No, I do. I just want you to solve both problems instead of just one of them. Because if you only solve one problem (not arbitrarily throwing people in jail), you're making life worse for an unspecified amount of people that the racists can target, are targeting, and have targeted. If you make it harder to fire racists for being racist (by closing whatever loopholes you require to make this happen), the upshot is racists are better-protected at work to be racist. That's it. That's a direct consequence. If you can't recognise that as a direct consequence I don't know what to say.

People aren't always doing these callout tactics because they're fun. They're doing it because they're marginalised, oppressed, and have literally no other recourse. If you want to fix the system so that employers can't hold employment like a sack of bricks over their employees heads? Good. I fully support that. Just do it in a way that also allows racists to still be called to account through whatever rigorous or systemic approach you can think of. Otherwise you're not making a net positive. You're fixing one problem, and making another one worse. And it's very hard to support that, especially in 2020 with how white supremacy and all of that mask off business seems to be going. This is the major problem with class-only takes on what should be an intersectional problem.

How do you protect the lives and safety of marginalised minorities by enacting class protections that are wholly inclusive of dangerous and harmful people? How do you do that? That's what I want to know.

 

[Socrates99]

The concept of free speech predates government.

Eh, normally I don't do this but citation required. Who exactly did this concept protect people from and who enforced this protection? What you're saying here sounds like putting the cart before the horse.

From what I understood it originated in Athenian democracy (a form of government). It was called parrhesia and meant speaking candidly. It protected people in the democracy who wanted to criticize the government.

 

[Yeekim]

The woman I was referencing, I was only referencing because she wasn't even fired.

"Even"?
So, everyone whose personal views might not perfectly align with yours should not even be able to find employment in a fast-food joint? Any estimate on how large part of society have you consigned to starving under a bridge?

How do you protect the lives and safety of marginalised minorities by enacting class protections that are wholly inclusive of dangerous and harmful people? How do you do that? That's what I want to know

You wish for one arbitrarily defined group of people to have protections that are not extended to another arbitrarily defined group of people?

 

[Lexicus]

No, I do. I just want you to solve both problems instead of just one of them. Because if you only solve one problem (not arbitrarily throwing people in jail), you're making life worse for an unspecified amount of people that the racists can target, are targeting, and have targeted. If you make it harder to fire racists for being racist (by closing whatever loopholes you require to make this happen), the upshot is racists are better-protected at work to be racist. That's it. That's a direct consequence. If you can't recognise that as a direct consequence I don't know what to say.

People aren't always doing these callout tactics because they're fun. They're doing it because they're marginalised, oppressed, and have literally no other recourse. If you want to fix the system so that employers can't hold employment like a sack of bricks over their employees heads? Good. I fully support that. Just do it in a way that also allows racists to still be called to account through whatever rigorous or systemic approach you can think of. Otherwise you're not making a net positive. You're fixing one problem, and making another one worse. And it's very hard to support that, especially in 2020 with how white supremacy and all of that mask off business seems to be going. This is the major problem with class-only takes on what should be an intersectional problem.

Okay, we need to settle some fundamental questions here. One can make an identical argument about murderers: requiring the state to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt means murderers are better-protected to commit murder. That's it. That's a direct consequence.

The thing is, it doesn't matter. It is better for one thousand guilty people to walk free, than for one innocent to go to prison. If you disagree with this basic idea then there is no point in further discussion. If you do agree, read on.

I would apply this principle, basically, to employment relations as well because I believe that employers, particularly larger business corporations that employ tens of thousands of people, are essentially governments in miniature, with powers delegated by the state in their corporate charters. I don't want to get too far into that aspect of the discussion.

As I believe I've said before, my view is that abolishing at-will employment will be better for racialized people than undermining worker protections so you can fire all the racists you want fired. I would take a similar position with respect to the state arbitrarily jailing or otherwise targeting racists. In the US if you give the state more police powers under any pretext you will find racialized people (and in particular, black people) being victimized by those powers. There are in fact direct examples of powers the government assumed, ostensibly to better protect racialized people from far-right terrorism, later being used against racialized people themselves.

Maybe you aren't framing the question as universal social protections against the welfare of racialized people on purpose, but that is what you are doing and I will continue to insist that is a false framing of the whole question. No sane person would say that doing away with trials or lessening the state's burden of proof in criminal cases would ultimately benefit black people because it would make it easier to target racists, and no sane person should make a similar argument about at-will employment, given that "black people are last hired, first fired" is something of a cliche (and borne out by racial disparities in the labor market which I assume we don't need to go into here).

 

[NovaKart]

I especially don’t agree with people getting fired over just something non-PC like a dumb joke, especially if it’s something posted online that’s not at all related to their job.

I mostly agree with TF and Lexicus on this but I don’t know if I would take it quite as far, I haven’t thought about it much.

 

[Traitorfish]

I'm not sure I agree with this, it seems close to "There's no such thing as society, only collective bargaining agreements."

I don't think that's implied, because I'm not ruling out the possibility that there are grounds for objection on the basis of the content of speech. The distinction I'm trying to draw is between is the way in which inter-personal interactions are governed by certain boundaries and expectations, especially in professional contexts where these are often detailed explicitly in some contract or HR manual, and comments made by public figures, to which these sorts of boundaries do not apply. A comment made by a public figure, however odious or wrong-headed, cannot in any strict sense be abusive.

In the example raised, the worker may have objected to both what the manager said and that he said it, but the union is going to act upon the latter by demonstrating that what the manager said was abusive, that he exceed his authority and that he breached the employees reasonable expectation that he be treated with a certain degree of civility by his employer. If Ben Shapiro says something stupid and repugnant, my objection is going to be to what he said, because there is no clear framework by which we might raise an objection to the fact of his saying it. The case of the abusive manager is not a question of free speech, because the manager does not have a reasonable expectation of free speech: by entering into his role as a manager in a workplace, he accepts certain restrictions. Public figures do not accept a comparable limitation, have not agreed to accept any comparable limitations, and so we cannot instruct them that they are not allowed to say whatever it is we object to, we can only argue that they should not say it, which is altogether different.

I believe the Chipotle employee was actually a manager but lower-tier managers in many ways have a just as bad a deal as minimum wage workers. They get paid more but the pay:responsibility ratio is likely lower.

"Manger" is a misnomer for most of these senior shop-floor workers, they don't make management-level decisions. I wouldn't be surprised if her actual title was something like "team leader", to justify withholding management-level pay and benefits.

The widespread assumption that there is one management-level position for every six or seven employees in the service industry is pretty outdated; it's more like a one-to-thirty ratio at this stage, and I don't think that one-in-fifty is uncommon.

You and I have talked a bit about this in the past, but we never covered the paradox of tolerance.

Skipping over the very funny attempt at gatekeeping, as leftism is multifaceted and a lot more interesting than that,

I don't actually agree with this. Labour protections are entry-level left-wing politics. Somebody who is opposed to labour protections, somebody who is in favour of at-will termination, is not on the left, whether or not they hold left-wing views.

I don't think that this is "gate-keeping", because there are a plethora of other non-negotiable criteria that we apply to "the left" without even thinking about it. Somebody who thinks that white people are the superior race, that homosexuality should be criminalised, or that women shouldn't be allowed to vote would not be recognised as "on the left", even if they held views that were. The reason that labour rights are not regarded as so self-evidently necessary is not because there is actually any serious, good faith discussion to be had around these, but because progressive liberals in the capitalist class and in the professional strata are hostile to labour rights, and have succeeded in muddying these waters.

...the upshot of your position in general is that we should always tolerate even the intolerable in protecting worker protections. But that's a given. This isn't anything new. Because there's a very important caveat you yourself say:

"because we should expect that if reasonable cause exist for their termination, the employer will be able to demonstrate it without great difficulty"

On the face of it this is simple. And more often than not, it can be proven. I've seen people fired for demonstrably, absolutely, making peoples' lives a living hell. But then again, I've seen people not fired for the exact same scenario. In my limited and privileged experience I have seen people burnt out of jobs by others, either by unintentional, unchecked, aggro, or by targeted grinding down until no willpower remained.

If we're going to no true Scotsman other leftists. If we're going to accuse folks of just being in it for the aesthetics. If that's the road you're going down in a wonderful example of purity politics (which is very funny in a thread on cancel culture, because you are in effect cancelling leftists of a slightly different strain). Then you also need to contend with this singular focus on worker protections. Because companies don't always want to fire the troublemaker. And don't get me wrong - this isn't me saying we don't need stronger worker protections. This is me criticising your tolerance of the intolerable because you don't seem to understand the cost of truly noxious people (as you put it) continuing to be employed.

I imagine that the role of labour unions expands beyond simply protecting people from termination, but to upholding a non-toxic work environment. Lexicus cited a version of this up-thread, of a labour union forcing a manager to moderate and apologise for his behaviour towards employees. My contention is not that toxic behaviour should be tolerated as the price of labour protections, it is that we should neither expect nor trust employers to be the arbiters of what constitutes acceptable behaviour.

"The paradox of intolerance" raises the questions of what limitations must be placed on an open society in order to ensure that it remains open; it does not imply that we should just abandon the project of an open society and let benevolent despots make all the important decisions, yet in terms of cultivating healthy working environments, benevolent despotism seems to be precisely the commonsense of progressive liberals who are prepared to abandon labour protections for the vague promise of a culturally progressive capitalism.

 

[Gorbles]

Going to have to take each person's post in turn, sorry.

"Even"?
So, everyone whose personal views might not perfectly align with yours should not even be able to find employment in a fast-food joint? Any estimate on how large part of society have you consigned to starving under a bridge?

. . . what are you on about? The premise was somebody being fired. An example was raised where somebody was not fired. There were no real negative consequences. There was no discussion of them finding employment. You're grasping at straws.

You wish for one arbitrarily defined group of people to have protections that are not extended to another arbitrarily defined group of people?

That wasn't my point. My point was you also need to account for the harm done by a harmful person, or persons, who are becoming better-protected by these changes. At the same time. In the same act. However you do it.

It's not enough to just have the protections. You need to consider and account for any consequences. This is not the same as saying said protections should not exist.