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I don't typically post primary level comments in CW threads but I was having a conversation with my wife last night that prompted me. It's not particularly explosive and treads much of the same ground as many more nuanced posts before it.
Last night I'm in the middle of sorting out a chicken lasagna among other things and I get this text from my wife: Something shocking happened at work today.
I checked the clock. I sleep very early most nights and I calculated roughly what time she'd be getting home, added how much time she'd need to decelerate and actually sit down for dinner, how long after that she'd get the story tellable in her mind, then how long it would take to hear it, factoring in my own responses, if any, her reactions to those, and keeping in mind the obvious unknown variable that maybe the story would, indeed, be shocking. I knew I'd be sleeping later than usual.
Because none of the trivialities of my day mean anything to anyone here I'll get to the point. A temp worker at her company under her tutelage has made noises that she may be leveling some sort of harassment
suit(edit: complaint) (power probably). Not against my wife, but against her direct supervisor. The reason? This temp worker has three complaints that I can tell:She was said to resemble a well-known (by other people, not me) celebrity chef on her first day. It may be relevant that I do not know what this chef looks like or whether being compared to her might be taken as an insult or compliment. This, to me, seems to matter, but maybe it doesn't, as simply the acknowledgement that the temp worker has an observable appearance and that this appearance has made some impression may, in the end, be the sin at hand.
She was asked if she is on Facebook.
She was asked her birthday.
2 and 3 were asked because apparently the supervisor was prompted by Facebook to "friend" a person with the same name as the relevant temp worker. Unsure and with no profile photo to go on, but assuming it might be her as the kanji for her name is rare and matched that of the recommended person, he unwisely and perhaps naively made his inquiry. I assume he asked her birthday for the same reason (that seems to be the case.) All of the above was done in full earshot and view of my wife and others in the office. This suggests it was not a hamhanded prelude to some attempt at making contact for an out-of-office assignation.
All this has erupted in now a series of slightly delayed-reaction texts from this woman to her work group (of which my wife is a part.) Asking whether the company has any sort of guidelines on this (my wife used a different word than guidelines but I can't remember it) and prodding that her complaints be sent up the company chain-of-command. Presumably to the mainest of main offices. The first step of this is already occurring.
I sat there listening and kept thinking to myself how Japan always seems to import the worst of American culture. From shitty hiphop styles (I'm old) to self-entitled behavior when dealing with service personnel (many convenience stores now have a term: customer harassment [kasuhara] because people are such assholes to workers. And I mean assholes. Like getting the worker to dougeza because of some imagined infraction. It doesn't help that this is a country where people commit suicide over hurt feelings.) To now a willingess to go Defcon 4 over what, to me, seem the mildest of social grievances. The triumph of HR.
I've no idea if this woman has a legitimate legal case. Recently a Hyogo prefectural governor came under fire for the kind of inappropriate behavior one would expect from a Thai royal. Or is it? In some ways it's par-for-the-course in what has always been a very hierarchical society. Sempai lord their authority over kohai who grumble but then become sempai a year later and do the same thing to their underlings. But the Hyogo guy's vwry public scandal has put the term powaah hara in the public lexicon.
But then I don't necessarily expect much from the law here, which sometimes seems applied with such bizarre reasoning it makes me wonder if I should GTFO now.
The terms sekuhara, powaah hara, kasuhara and whatever else are all abbreviated forms of borrowed terms from English (sexual harassment, power harassment, customer harassment, etc.)
Anyway we'll see. My wife is upset because she wonders at the repercussions on her supervisor, whom she likes, and with whom she has a friendly working relationship. "If it becomes like this," she said, "how will anyone be able to work together at all?"
Possibilities: I'm hearing this at least once removed. Tone, language used, body language, eye contact, all are unknown to me (but will also be unknown to anyone who adjudicates this). Maybe this supervisor guy leers at the tempworker and my wife just isn't aware of it. Maybe the temp company assured her that at this work no one would ever ask her anything personal about anything and now that's happened. Maybe the temp worker is aware of some other infractions that have occurred in her sight and this is her way of bringing all into the harsh cleansing light. Maybe, as Jordan Peterson has suggested, men and women just may not be able to work together, despite common sense western (and eastern) assumptions.
I nodded. She was right: It was shocking. But I slept earlier than I had expected.
I don't know anything about Japanese culture, so I can't offer any comments of value. But I'll blast out a few unconnected thoughts that I think are pertinent here.
I have seen dozens of examples of new / first-time managers seemingly forget everything they ever learned about social behavior. I think the pressure of "being in charge" can do strange things to people (even if they are simply in charge of making sure everyone does what they're already doing). In the American The Office (which I despise) a major cornerstone of the plot and characters is how the "Boss", Michael Scott, is a cringe machine who cannot lead his employees effectively and cannot be-friend them socially. Power dynamics (which is a term I despise) complicate relationships. If it's hard for an individual to navigate social relationships already, being a boss can be a bridge too far.
Men and women can absolutely work together, but it won't be the equity-and-inclusion utopia that the HR bots believe in. This has nothing to do with sexual harassment or office romance, and everything to do with group decision making styles. Women seek to build complete group consensus, Men are more prone to making decisions and then getting the group behind them. Women will indirectly criticize and use covert tactics to challenge, Men are more direct and will "disagree and commit." The problem has become that the HR bots have deemed all of that male behavior verboten; toxic, hostile, etc. What has taken it's place is a laundering of classic male group dynamics to be more "acceptable" to female styles of communication. The HR bots collect their rent by commanding large salaries to rubber stamp these goofy interactions - and, of course, to defend the behavior of executives no matter how outrageous.
Sexual harassment is often a "know it when I see it" transgression. It's also, unfortunately, a very relative thing. There is a meme about this. We can culture war about that (and I'm sure we will). My specific question would be - what's the best way to deal with a delusion person who thinks that any social attention is sexual harassment? A given employee - male or female - simply believes that any passing kind comment is an overt indication of romantic intent. How do you deal with this? Can you imagine sitting Bob or Alice down and saying something like "Phil from accounting doesn't want to fuck you." That in and of itself would be sexual harassment. Try a different approach, "Bob/Alice, you've submitted 5 sexual harassment complaints this year. All were investigated and none were substantiated. Maybe take a step back?" Again - wouldn't this turn into some sort of complaint?
My weak submission is simply to keep at-will employment as strong as possible. If an employee is just causing problems (sexual harassment or otherwise), leadership should be permitted to fire them easily. But even that's not necessarily a clean end. I think there was a post on here about wrongful-termination suits being 90% fantastic bullshit and 10% "holy hell, fucking sue that company into oblivion." HR beyond the grave but in reverse.
I disagree with your final paragraph. We don't want the female worker in the OP to be able to easily get the other guy fired. American CEOs sided with BLM and started enforcing stronger antiwhite quotas. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-26/corporate-america-kept-its-promise-to-hire-more-people-of-color
It is easier for higher ups to be ideologically captured, and they cannot be trusted as a class with power to do whatever they want. Of course, the system is such that there are pressures in that direction, including from the goverment.
There should be all sorts of pressures to allow people to be fired for valid reasons, and not allow them to be fired for invalid reasons like those who have been fired for being insufficiently left wing. The concept of frivolous complaints and people being politically correct troublemakers should be sufficiently common and they will be less inclined to be that. Female coworkers claiming harassment over BS like this case, should count as bad behavior.
At the same time, it is fair for female workers not to be groped for example and to be able to make complaints about that. I dunno how common that is in Japanese corporations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chikan_(body_contact)
And in an environment of strict legal equality, women are granted this power.
It's only a solvable problem in a totalitarian system, where the computer actually knows what he-said and she-said (and where this is already the case, usually when the text message logs enter the court record, the case gets thrown out... and then the laws get changed to make text messages inadmissible), but if we had a totalitarian system equality wouldn't be a thing anyway.
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