This is nothing to do with the political climate of the US in 2020, it's very much to do with the fact that formative experiences early in my career very strongly influenced the prior that work and personal lives are streams that shall not be crossed, and coworkers are not to be trusted.
Seems insane to me.
And setting aside the close-reading and the statistics, we should not be naive about his intention, which is to characterize Mexican immigrants as dangerous criminals. Again, should I have to wonder if my coworker believes this about me or my family?
Are you looking at illegal immigrants here, or just legal immigrants? Because it seems like this would be trivially false for illegal immigrants.
Also, the answer to your questions are predominantly no.
If you'd like to address my questions more specifically, I would be happy to read your response. But attempting to shut down my questions because you disagree with the direction you think they're heading is exactly what I thought we were opposed to.
Fundamentally I at least do not want to work with someone who is even still on the level of asking questions like "is racism bad?" or "do women deserve rights?". But a lot of people do do that. If I was hiring... I wouldn't want to hire people thinking like that. Its going to negatively impact what would almost certainly be a diverse group of people trying to cooperatively work together.
It only feels problematic because we each recognize both how biased against the worker the power dynamic in modern western society is and that the job is not merely "the thing you do during the day with your buds" but "the means by which you put food in your mouth and have a bed". If its only about the former breaking relations over political leanings makes perfect sense, for the latter its ruining someones life over "frivolous politics".
I'd rather be in the world where groups dissociate over ideological incompatibilities but where nobody is homeless or hungry for it than the one where ones need for food and shelter is an excuse to let toxic people make life worse for those around them.
At least for me that’s not the case at all.
I guess diversity includes everything but diversity of political opinion?
I know these are serious topics, but I hope we can all take a moment to have a laugh at this typo :).
If Person A can't work with Person B because they don't like their political opinions and Person B keeps their opinions to themselves while on the job, I'd be much more likely to get rid of Person A. I would see them as the person that is causing strife in the workplace, not the other way around.
More money (for whom? and by what means?) is not always better.
But there's a difference between simplicity in jobs like flipping burgers vs finance, and that's power. If we work in a job that is both powerful AND simple (like many in tech & finance), it's likely many unintended externalities are being created.
Externalities, because they affect others, have strong political ramifications. So if you're working in a field with a lot of power, and you're having simple to nonexistent conversation about externalities, there's a good chance you're contributing to the problems you're trying to avoid discussing by virtue of wielding power blindly.
Perhaps those externalities would be better solved at their source of the workplace rather than let fester in the public sphere. This is a sort of 'ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' argument for why its important that workplaces engage in these discussions, and why the shareholder value maximization approach is too reductionist for corporate entities of any meaningful size or power.
I would love to see better defined contacts or unionization.
Most of the stuff they push, I'm not opposed to in general. My opinions tend to be more focused on the libertarian implementation of achieving those things and adhering to rule of law. This tends to be aligned with the outcomes they say they stand for, but it's not the 'right' answer (liberal).
And don't even think about telling a joke that could even slightly be misinterpreted or overheard by a 3rd party. A guy from my building got fired for moving a diversity poster because somebody thought the action was offensive.
I'll happely meet a co-worker over lunch/dinner to discuss things more deeply.
But since over time the workplaces is inevitably shaped by the society it is in, in my opinion we might as well try figure out ways to deal with broader issues while at work, instead of pretending they are isolated. (I'm not saying I have a good solution of how this would look like.)
I have noted that the 2 options when talking politics at work are that either 1. you'll disagree, or 2. you'll agree, and I'm not sure which option is worse.
Cancel culture is tedious moralizing, but mostly a media spectacle meant to drive attention to various figures and platforms. The average worker has more to fear from those who sign their paychecks than anyone else.
A better solution is to stop deductions for employer-sponsored healthcare and shift the expense from the employer to the employee with a mandate that old employer health insurance premiums be passed on to employees as wages.
That deduction is the largest lever when it comes to the cost of health insurance (short of bad IP policy and regulation of pharma products).