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Agree completely with your title, and I think there's an irony here: namely, that one of the most genuinely objectionable work-politics-related phenomena is driven by a presumption that people *can't avoid* bringing their whole self to work.
Namely, it happens sometimes that a bunch of employees will find out that one of their co-workers has either
(a) expressed, outside of work, political views on culture war issues that they find offensive and/or
(b) expressed themselves generally, outside of work, using language/idioms/etc they find offensive
and this bunch of employees will petition for that co-worker to be fired, despite having no evidence of actual workplace misconduct on the co-worker's part, on the grounds that the co-worker's outside-of-work expressions make them feel unsafe about working with them.
Off the top of my head, I remember this happening at Google with Miles Taylor and Kay Coles James; in both cases there was a messy internal controversy over it that left nobody happy and burned a lot of people's time. It seems to have happened earlier with Brendan Eich at Mozilla, and more recently may have happened (I say "seems" and "may" because at a greater remove, I can't exclude that something else was going on) with Antonio Garcia Martinez at Apple.
The more you believe that people can, and should be expected to, refrain from bringing their whole self to work-- the more you believe they can and should compartmentalize, follow professional norms in the workplace even if they personally disagree, etc-- the more skeptical you should be about these kinds of calls for firings, IMO. I'm not saying it's never justified: nonwhite employees have good reason to be worried if their company literally hires Richard Spencer. But I think a significant minority of people, in a cultural demographic overrepresented in tech, have talked themselves into believing that anyone who disagrees with them on culture-war issues is literally Richard Spencer. And I think this is one reason people might support "no politics" rules, even though they are overbroad and likely to cause just the harms you are talking about. So, optimistically, we might hope that proper compartmentalization expectations, and the depolarization of the workplace they might bring, could lessen support for such rules!
Agree completely with your title, and I think there's an irony here: namely, that one of the most genuinely objectionable work-politics-related phenomena is driven by a presumption that people *can't avoid* bringing their whole self to work.
Namely, it happens sometimes that a bunch of employees will find out that one of their co-workers has either
(a) expressed, outside of work, political views on culture war issues that they find offensive and/or
(b) expressed themselves generally, outside of work, using language/idioms/etc they find offensive
and this bunch of employees will petition for that co-worker to be fired, despite having no evidence of actual workplace misconduct on the co-worker's part, on the grounds that the co-worker's outside-of-work expressions make them feel unsafe about working with them.
Off the top of my head, I remember this happening at Google with Miles Taylor and Kay Coles James; in both cases there was a messy internal controversy over it that left nobody happy and burned a lot of people's time. It seems to have happened earlier with Brendan Eich at Mozilla, and more recently may have happened (I say "seems" and "may" because at a greater remove, I can't exclude that something else was going on) with Antonio Garcia Martinez at Apple.
The more you believe that people can, and should be expected to, refrain from bringing their whole self to work-- the more you believe they can and should compartmentalize, follow professional norms in the workplace even if they personally disagree, etc-- the more skeptical you should be about these kinds of calls for firings, IMO. I'm not saying it's never justified: nonwhite employees have good reason to be worried if their company literally hires Richard Spencer. But I think a significant minority of people, in a cultural demographic overrepresented in tech, have talked themselves into believing that anyone who disagrees with them on culture-war issues is literally Richard Spencer. And I think this is one reason people might support "no politics" rules, even though they are overbroad and likely to cause just the harms you are talking about. So, optimistically, we might hope that proper compartmentalization expectations, and the depolarization of the workplace they might bring, could lessen support for such rules!