The American View: We’ll All Be Talking About Abortion in the Office Now, Like It or Not

Management

It’s a danged awful time to be a working American. Sure, we have experienced unprecedented wage growth this last year after decades of stagnation. Also, more Americans voluntarily left their job this last year for a better one at rates not seen in twenty years. At the same time, many large companies learned from the pandemic lockdown that they can (and should) continue or even expand their pandemic “work from home” and “fully remote” programs. You’d be forgiven for assuming the pendulum has finally swung back in workers’ favour. You would also be wrong.

While those great strides forward are all true and most welcome, they don’t paint a complete picture of how American office has changed over the last decade. Cultural norms that made controversial topics taboo subjects in the office have been eroded to the point of being completely ineffective. It’s now depressingly common to hear political, social, and even religious arguments break out in the cubicle farms, break rooms, and smoking decks. Arguments that can rapidly evolve into shouting matches, scuffles, and worse.

American labour law does allow employers to set reasonable limits on the discussion of certain topics in their workplaces. Back during our last presidential election, there was a ton of corporate interest about what the National Labor Relations Board would and wouldn’t allow when it came to quashing political arguments in the office. An explainer posted on JD Supra in 2020 summarized it thusly: “… Opinions expressed in this highly politicized atmosphere though, can undermine worker productivity or even result in claims of harassment, discrimination, retaliation or a hostile work environment.

“As a result, employers face the complicated legal and practical issue of lawfully regulating speech in the workplace to ensure that the workforce remains productive and respectful of the rights and differences of co-workers. Maintaining a productive and harmonious workforce requires that employers understand the limits on their right to regulate or impose rules that limit political speech and expression in the workplace and enforce the rules in a lawful manner.”

These are nightmarish challenges for corporate HR, Legal, and Security departments. When management’s goal is to maintain a safe, productive, and harmonious workplace for all personnel, the prospect of people arguing inflammatory politics is unnerving. For-and-against political divides in our culture have become such hair trigger topics that parents were assaulting teachers last year for wearing protective masks. No leader wants that to see something violent like that happen in their office.

Then again, the guy I took over squadron command from delighted in keeping his subordinates constantly hating and scheming against each other. He wanted a dysfunctional organisation and succeeded spectacularly. Took me a decade to fix his toxic mess.

On the other hand, companies don’t want to get sued for – or, worse, lampooned in the media for –imposing draconian restrictions on their employees’ speech. Most any attempt to quash touchy topics in the office risks public backlash and employee resentment. I feel for every policy committee member that’s grappled with this mess and still forged a functional compromise.

Here’s the thing, though: most (sane) Americans understand that political divisions make for sensitive conversation topics. It’s been a running joke for ages that politics and family dinners mix about as well as orphanages and arson: no one will leave happy, there’s guaranteed to be screaming, and there might be some deaths depending on the seating arrangement. That in mind, it’s often not difficult to persuade business leaders that political discussions should be discouraged in the office; the thorny question is how much?

But, then, things had to go and escalate because this hell-decade just won’t relent. If you were paying attention to American news last week, you heard that an internal draft majority opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court was leaked to the press revealing that the five hard right wing justices (as opposed to the court’s four moderate right wing justices) voted to overturn settled law that guaranteed a woman’s right to abortion. This has been the hottest of the “hot button” issues in American politics since the 1980s. Extremist opposition to women’s reproductive care services has led to harassment, vandalism, arson, kidnapping, attempted murder, and, yes, the murder of at least eleven people. This is not a parlour table discussion topic, and this latest political manoeuvre has just kicked the conflict into overdrive.

Making things worse, the dubious “reasoning” in Judge Alito’s draft appears to be paving the way to

Remember, the plan was never to stop with abortion. It was always about rolling back everything. Everything that gave rights to everyone else.

Brown v. Board, Loving v. Virginia, Obergefell v. Hodges, they’re coming for it all https://t.co/xLJjgszinx
— Sidequest | Ligerzero @ KH TRASH (@LigerzeroGaming) May 3, 2022

. The logic he used to justify striking down Roe vs. Wade seems precisely attuned to wipe out same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, and even adults’ access to contraception in the United States. [1] Hell, one racist

Peter Brimelow, a former National Review editor who now runs the racist website VDARE, celebrated the Roe news by posting on the alt social media site Gab: "Next stop Brown vs. Board!" pic.twitter.com/nYpfErOaVI
— Nick Martin (@nickmartin) May 3, 2022

that this decision was intended to eventually roll back the racial desegregation of schools!

If you think an employee’s opinion about who should be elected president next might be controversial, this leaked decision by the Supreme Court makes 2020’s elevated risk potential look like a friendly game of checkers. Making things worse, the steady evisceration of American social norms that previously constrained the discussion of controversial topics in shared spaces has meant there’s effectively no easy way to suppress arguments over Alito’s new gambit in the office. People aregoing to talk, and things are going to get heated.

How could they not? When one side of the political spectrum wants to completely eliminate all access to health care that might include abortion, many of every company’s’ employees will be affected – directly or indirectly – and will have questions that can’t wait about everything from insurance coverage, to using paid time off to travel out of state for healthcare, to liability exposure for visiting a clinic while traveling for business. If your key support staff don’t have answers to those questions ready and policies in place now, be prepared for a rush of urgent appeals.

When the apparatus of the status has been weaponized against you just for existing, your transfer request can’t be “deferred until next quarter.”

That in mind, many American corporations have stated that they’ll support their workers get the care they need, including Citigroup, Match, Yelp, Lyft, Uber, Salesforce, Levi’s, Apple, GoDaddy, and Amazon. [2] Taking such a stance, by the way, will probably trigger a media and consumer backlash by people who don’t agree with corporations taking such steps … and parallel backlashes by people who want such steps against corporations that don’t. It’s going to get ugly.

Making things worse, “at least 23 states have pre-Roe abortion bans still on the books or have passed so-called trigger laws that would sharply limit access to the procedure if Roe were to be overturned.” [3] Texas’s “trigger law,” for example, would mean doctor’s would face life in prison if they perform abortions. This builds on Texas’s recent SB8 legislation that cynically deputized citizen vigilantes to hunt and harass not only women seeking abortion care, but also anyone who helps them in any way: “The Texas law bars state officials from actually enforcing it, a design intended to make it difficult to challenge in the courts.,” Roni Caryn Rabin wrote in the New York Times.

“Usually a lawsuit aiming to block such a law as unconstitutional names state officials as defendants. Instead, the Texas law deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion or ‘aids and abets’ a procedure. Plaintiffs who have no connection to the patient or the clinic may sue and recover legal fees, as well as $10,000 if they win.”

If the court’s decision is meant to reverse other civil rights legislation as well, then people affected by all resulting downstream court decisions might seek to abandon the Neo-Gilead states. Imagine the effect of undoing the protections of Obergefell v. Hodges … I, Oklahoma, for example, retroactively makes same-sex marriage illegal, then same-sex married couples currently living there would likely relocate to a state that still recognized their union.

Polarizing laws like this motivate workers to leave regressive states like Texas for places that aren’t trying to devolve into authoritarian theocracies. Meanwhile, people in favour of the new restrictive environment might flee more liberal states and cities for new homes in conservative country. In both cases, if their current company won’t help, count on these workers to quit. The net effect will be a shift of talent and experience away from so-called “centres of excellence” and major industry hubs towards ideologically polarized regions of the country.

Reminds me of something we covered in history class … Can’t quite remember what … Maybe it’ll come to me later.

Given that about half of the American states are poised to eliminate some or all abortion care as soon as Roe is overturned, the potential for massive and disruptive demographic changes must be addressed … and that’s going to mean discussing the topic at all levels of the organisation. HR can’t just silence all speech on the topic; at the very least, workers must discuss their options with supervisors and coordinate their transition of duties with teammates and key stakeholders.

So, yeah. The subject is going to come up. It might start in confidence with HR or Legal, but it’s definitely going to ripple through your entire organisation in short order given how many people are going to be affected by all the changes. Moreover, you can bet your bottom dollar that tempers are going to flare when the subjects come up. It’s only going to take one mouthy malcontent making derisive complaints about a relocating colleague (D or R, liberal or conservative; it doesn’t matter) to trigger a fist fight in the cubicle farm between those

I am angry because an extremist Supreme Court thinks they can impose their extremist views on all of the women of this country and they are wrong.

I have seen the world where abortion is illegal. We’re not going back—not now, not ever. pic.twitter.com/5lE8rCQz5U
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) May 3, 2022

and those

You really wish the people who want Roe, Obergefell, Loving, and other progressive decisions overturned would just say "I don't want people I deem inferior to have the same rights I do." They couch it in norms, tradition, whatever. But that's what it is.
— Mike Rothschild (@rothschildmd) May 4, 2022

. This isn’t an “if” scenario; it’s a “when” and a “how bad” challenge.

All that said, I urge security leaders and departments across America to step up and join the critical discussions about what their organisations are going to do to mitigate the chaos. Security people see the world differently than other corporate types. We have the tools to detect malicious intent and capture evidence of harassment. We have the mindset to understand disruptive behaviour and the experience to neutralize it before it inflicts catastrophic damage. We’re already part of the “insider threat” and “active shooter” prevention programs. We just need to expand our scope a smidge to help deal with this new cultural upheaval.

For the sake of protecting people, we need to weigh in on everything from monitoring disruptive behaviour to increasing physical security measures to removing troublemakers from the ranks. As much as we might like to, we can’t let HR and Legal fight this dragon on their own. We exist to help our organisations navigate through the worst of the storms ahead. This time it’s social, legal, logistical, and workplace violence threat instead of malware, phishing, or a DDOS attack. It’s still “security work.” Cowboy up and get the job done.

I know it won’t be easy. This situation is going to get a lot worse before it gets better … assuming it ever does get better. That factor exists echelons above our remit. We might not be able to do anything meaningful to fix our terminally broken political system, but we can do a lot to create and maintain a relatively safe work environment for the people entrusted to our care. We owe them no less, politics be damned.

[1] Check out Wajahat Ali’s article at the Daily Beast if you want a more detailed explanation.

[2] Per this article by Alex Millson on Bloomberg.

[]3 Per this article by Dan Goldberg on Politico.

Management