I was doing some online training for a new job, and one of them was of course Diversity and Inclusion training. Part of the course was about harassment, and the way they were talking about it was honestly disgusting. I transcribed a particularly egregious portion below:
Harassment is considered illegal if it’s so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile work environment. A hostile work environment is unwelcome behaviors that unreasonably interfere with an employee’s ability to work and/or create an intimidating, aggression-filled or offensive work environment. Hostile work environments can make employees not look forward to coming to work, which affects the quality of their performance, and can lead to increased absentee rates and decreased productivity.
Are we joking right now? This can’t be serious. Are we saying you couldn’t think of a single other reason that harassment might be bad, outside of profit producing productivity?
Really didn’t expect to be made sick by this training course, of all things, and yet here we are.
corporate mouthpieces have done one heck of a job to make every single issue of society be either derived from or leading towards inefficiency over the past decades. People still believe in the 21st century that we have scarcity of things that are required for living (housing, food, electricity), and so whatever is bad for that efficiency is taken to be harmful to society itself, instead of just for the bourgeois “employers.” It also applies to other “inefficient” things like unions, guaranteed basic rights, and democracy, so if you take those easier to grasp things are taken to be inefficient, more complex issues such as workplace harassment or mental health are much easier to write off that way too.
You can apply this to other facets of life and see it in action. Public education is inefficient, breaking medication patents is theft, electoral reforms for better democracy are a waste of money. Making things better for common people is always weighed against how much it’s gonna cost to the bourgies, but then they turn around and pretend we are the ones who’ll be shouldering the cost (and in some cases they’re right, because they also own the government).