[Politics] Political Hobbyism Has Entered the Workplace

[FazzNoth]

A new style of activism in the white-collar workplace is reshaping corporate life.

Michael Scott, the office manager, requires his employees to choose an upside-down index card from a tray and place it on their forehead. The cards bear a racial or ethnic label black, jewish, italian, and so on and Michael tells the employees to treat one another according to the label listed on the card and to “stir the melting pot” by playing to racial stereotypes. The scene, which ends with Michael getting slapped in the face, mocks corporate America’s ham-handed approach to diversity training. Back in 2005, almost no one saw the C-suite or the human-resources office as an engine of progressive change. Indeed, the idea that workers would look to their employers for leadership on any delicate social or political matters seemed risible.Donald Trump’s presidency led companies to start regularly issuing political statements on major developments in the news. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd, and the subsequent protest movement, prompted companies not only to incorporate more diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives into the workplace, but also to adopt “anti-racism” messaging, for which merely showing tolerance wasn’t enough.

 

Participants are urged to actively promote anti-racist policy goals rendering these sessions far more overtly political than their predecessors of the 1990s and early 2000s.Although political chitchat has always been part of office culture, the volume of the discourse and the extent to which it is coming from management are departures from the past. As a senior manager at a New York insurance firm recently told me, “I probably get just as many emails” from the company’s executives “about social-justice or environmental stuff as I do about how the company is doing. And that’s just not how it was … That’s a major shift that’s only happened in the last two or three years.” Bosses across the country, particularly in white-collar workplaces, are pumping out tweets and press releases about the midterm election, abortion rights, and the war in Ukraine. They are hosting mandatory trainings and workshops that come uncomfortably close to the TV parody.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/11/office-politics-activism-democrat-republican/672214/