May 14, 2021

"Microaggressions at the office can make remote work even more appealing/Extended remote work during the pandemic has highlighted how much energy people of color, women, and people with disabilities expend dealing with microaggressions in the office."

A headline at WaPo. From the text:

In a Twitter discussion on office microaggressions, people said working at home has largely spared them from having to deal with such incidents as:
  • having colleagues touch their hair 
  • being mistaken for another colleague of the same race (a problem solved by having names displayed in video meetings) 
  • overhearing insensitive commentary on or being pressured to discuss traumatizing news events such as racist violence or coronavirus outbreaks in their home country 
  • fielding comments from passersby on their “angry” (actually focused) expressions....

Allowing people to work in an environment where they don’t feel the need to keep their guard up means “releasing that mental burden from people who are … getting paid to think"....

Notice the potential for a legal argument: Denying the work-at-home option constitutes race/sex discrimination. There's also new reason to see a failure to accommodate the disabled:

[One employee's] health improved at home, away from colleagues wearing asthma-triggering scents. Workers with disabilities may have been spared the stress of navigating building access and transportation challenges....

And there's the general fear of violence that can be framed as discrimination — and it's not even discrimination in the workplace that the employer could attempt to fix:

And given the documented rise in anti-Asian violence over the past year, Asian workers who reasonably fear for their safety while commuting on public transit might feel safer if they continue working from home....

I guess concern about "anti-Asian violence" is in vogue, but what about women? Obviously, women feel burdened by threats of violence when making their way from the home to the workplace and back again. I suspect that the option to work at home — for any work that can be done at home — has already become something that cannot be denied. Arguments that work needs to be done in person will be countered with the real-world evidence of how it was done at home during the lockdown.

ADDED: I'm saying it's already happened: The right to work at home has already come into being. No sooner did I say that then I realized: It's systemic racism! (And systemic sexism. And systemic ableism.) What has been created is an option to behave in a way that will be attractive to women and minorities and the disabled. 

As they take this option, for their own individual benefit, they remove themselves from the workplace, make themselves invisible, and cede the active arena to the white males — the able white males — as it was in the past! And it will all be done under the cover of supporting the workers in the groups that were once excluded from the workplace. And by "it," I mean: exclusion from the workplace!

Oh! White male supremacy is devious indeed! Here, we'll give you what you want. You'll be so much more comfortable here. At home!

3 comments:

Ann Althouse said...

Lucien emails:

It seems like it might be fun to have all the people terrified of micro-aggressions and violence on the subway staying huddled at home hoarding their masks, but imagine the inequity if that happened?

If the workplace became limited to cis-gendered straight white males, they could spend their time there telling politically incorrect jokes, going to lunch together, networking, setting up golf games, etc. This would make it an even more hostile environment for the intersectional.

It would be racist/sexist/misogynistic/transhopbic/homophobic/ableist to promote such a workplace. Going to work would be a badge of Whiteness!

Equity would demand a requirement that white people must work from home.

Ann Althouse said...

Birches writes: "More "journalists" recycling Twitter content into articles. At least Twitchy is honest about it. The WaPo pretends like they're doing real work."

Yeah, I have a tag for that: MSM reports what's in social media (or something like that).

Ann Althouse said...

Bob writes: "Somewhat in response to Lucien, I'm thinking this could become a huge area for litigation in the years to come. The people who show up for work are more likely to get promotions and better raises (face time matters), so the benefits all accrue to the whites. Eventually, working from home may become one more "unfair advantage" whites have over non-whites. At a minimum it might become a "disparate impact" issue. If so, prepare for the hand-wringing and lawyering up to come. Black Jobs Matter!"