Workplace

Comment Of The Day: “Verdict: ‘Quiet Quitting’ Is Unethical. Next Question?”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

[The caption on perhaps my favorite Charles Addams cartoon reads, “We never could have done it without him.”]

I thought that the essay on “quiet quitting” would spark a good discussion, and when I think that, I’m usually wrong. This time I was right, and among the excellent comments was this Comment of the Day by Tim Hayes, who focuses on the crucial aspect of the issue that I barely touched on at all: the responsibilities of management.

Here is Tim’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Verdict: “Quiet Quitting” Is Unethical. Next Question?”…

***

So, full disclosure, I hate the terminology and discussions around “quiet quitting”, both as a manager, and as an employee. Part of this is because it is unethical – but also part of it is because a lot of current discussions seem to be about deflections and doublespeak, and they just frankly aren’t doing anyone any good.

Some instances of quiet quitting are simply laziness on the part of the employee – this shouldn’t surprise us (I can make a strong argument that laziness when possible is actually a biological predisposition, and furthermore beneficial to societies when channeled appropriately), and while performing excellently is a virtue, and should be a path to success, it is not a necessity in all things. The American experiment, and indeed all civilizations (Western and Eastern), have gotten along just fine with the majority of individuals being mediocre – the trick has historically lay in defining mediocre as still sufficiently productive to support a society when the majority of its members are at that level, while allowing those who wish to perform exceptionally to do so. So, in the situation where quiet quitting is about laziness, the only major question to be answered is what constitutes acceptable levels of performance in the role at hand, and have those been adequately defined and communicated to the person in that role.

This is why I hate hearing the discussions as a manager – they almost always ignore that there is a failure of leadership/management in these cases. If I have someone who is performing the job as I’ve described it to them, and is actually meeting my set standards for acceptable levels of performance, yet their performance of their responsibilities is insufficient in some way, then it is axiomatic that I have failed to define as acceptable the levels of performance that are sufficient to fulfill my need. If, conversely, I have described acceptable levels of performance and the person is not meeting them, and so my business needs are not being met, than I am failing to hold this person to the standards I have set. Continue reading →

Verdict: “Quiet Quitting” Is Unethical. Next Question?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I had happily never heard of the term “quiet quitting” until last week, and now it is supposedly a hotly-debated ethics topic. There’s nothing to debate about. “Quiet quitting” is not new (the term may be new), nor is there any defense for it. It is un-American to its core. But as so many American values are being eroded by revolutionary fervor of people who simply don’t like the unique history, culture and principles that make the nation the unique entity that it is, it figures that slacking at one’s job and being self-righteous about it would be on the rise.

It is, there is little doubt about that. Ethics Alarms has mentioned the trend of increasingly poor and unaccommodating service in every sector. The usual explanation is the under-staffing that the destructive pandemic lockdown facilitated, but it’s good that focus is falling on the declining belief in seeking excellence in all one does, and putting out one’s best effort at all times. The death throes of American dedication to excellence as a cultural value is what has been newly christened “quiet quitting,” the many ways in which workers reduce the time, energy, and care they commit to their jobs.

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Case Study In Minneapolis: The Compensatory Racial Discrimination Slippery Slope

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Or perhaps they just don’t believe in the Constitution in Minneapolis—you know, like in California. The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers struck a deal last March 25 with the Minneapolis Public Schools ending a teacher strike, and among the provisions was “educators of color protections.” If a non-white teacher is first on the list to be let go for budget reasons, the school system must fire a white teacher with the “next least” seniority instead.

Got that?

The agreement reads in part,

“Starting with the Spring 2023 Budget Tie-Out Cycle, if excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the District shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population.”

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Ethics Quiz: The Secret Service Defies Orders!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

As soon as I saw the headline to Prof. Turley’s latest post on his blog, “Res Ipsa Loquitur” I knew we had an ethics quiz: “Presidential Protection or Abduction: Why Secret Service Wrong for all the Right Reasons on Jan. 6.”

Turley’s article was prompted by one aspect of the Jan. 6 Commission testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson that President Trump ordered his official SUV to take him to the U.S. Capitol to be on hand with his supporters as they rallied (it turned out to be a “mostly peaceful” rally) against what Trump had told them was the stolen 2020 election. According to the witness, that she was told that T his Secret Service security team refused, causing the President to become furious.

Turley’s take, in brief:

…the Secret Service is trained to take immediate action to protect a president. On the other hand, it cannot effectively control the presidency by controlling a president like a modern Praetorian Guard. In the end, if this account is true, the security team was likely wrong in refusing the order of the President to be taken to Capitol Hill….Trump intended to do exactly what he promised and ordered the Secret Service to take him to the Capitol. But Tony Ornato, White House deputy chief of staff for operations, and Bobby Engel, who headed Trump’s security detail, reportedly refused.

…If true, the security team’s motivation certainly was commendable. It probably prevented Jan. 6 from getting much, much worse…what was the authority of the security team to refuse a direct order from a sitting president to go to Congress?

…The Secret Service has always assumed discretion in seizing a president to protect him from immediate harm [but there was no immediate harm threatened]…Trump reportedly decided he wanted to lead the protests to the Capitol and didn’t care about the security uncertainties — and he actually had a right to do so. Presidents can elect to put themselves in harm’s way… The Secret Service has no authority to put a president into effective custody against his will… In Trump’s case, he reportedly said he did not want to go back to the White House but was taken there anyway.

…This act of disobedience may have saved the country from an even greater crisis…

In the end, the security team was correct on the merits but probably wrong on the law. This was not an unlawful order, and a president must be able to control his own travel. In other words, the agents were wrong for all the right reasons.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is: Continue reading →

If The Last Post (About Emerson College Promoting Anti-White Racism) Bothered You, Samuel L. Jackson Has A Suggestion Before You Read This One…[UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

In Illinois, Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will now require teachers to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students. Let me repeat that…

Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will now require teachers to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students.

This is called “Transformative Education Professional Development & Grading.” It’s transformative, all right. It is a great way to transform black students into societal cripples who cannot master what many behavioral scientists believe are the most crucial skills for life success, because they are given an institutional pass.

This ridiculous and divisive concept is, of course, yet another effort to eliminate persistent discrepancies between racial groups by pretending that they are caused by racism, and lowering standards so everyone has an equally low bar to clear.  OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionately hurt the grades of black students, like for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in  assignments. This will, you know—don’t they know?—set up black students to skip work, misbehave in other settings, and fail to complete their assigned jobs and tasks. Continue reading →

So You’re A Bigot, Then, And Discard Fairness And Reciprocity As Guiding Values! Thanks, Malcolm Gladwell! Good To Know…

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

I was once a big Malcolm Gladwell (“The Tipping Point”) fan before I figured out the pop psychology and “airplane book” author’s shtick. This latest revelation completes my disenchantment. On his website, Gladwell, discussing interview questions, wrote that he never hired any job applicants who answered in the negative when asked whether they could drive a manual transmission automobile. Those who have mastered a shift and clutch, Gladwell says,realize that the most fun cars in the world to drive are sports cars with manual transmission, and they like the idea of being able to turn a rote activity (driving) into an enjoyable activity. That, and his belief that people who drive a shift like “knowing how to do things that most people do not,” causes him to conclude that these are the only people he wants to work with

Got it. He’s a bigot and an asshole. If I were asked that question and I wasn’t interviewing for a chauffeur, I would ask, “What does that have to do with anything?” The question is really no different from asking one’s religion or party affiliation, ethnic background or position on abortion. It’s a justification for bigotry. The question would be enough for me to terminate the interview, and walk out. I don’t want to work with unfair people.

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On “Correct Pronouns,” Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I began this inquiry two days ago, intending to complete it forthwith, but then a sick, broken, psychopathic teen in Texas murdered his grandmother, children and teachers with an AR-15 with the predictable Ethics Train Wreck gathering steam once again. Let’s finish up before something else goes wrong.

Ann Althouse is at fault: she flagged Roxane Gay’s New York Times advice column “Work Friend,” focusing on this question from the ubiquitous “Anonymous”:

In the past six months, my organization approved the optional inclusion of pronouns in email signatures. I learned that one of my team members uses nonbinary pronouns. In my written communication and conversation about that team member, I now use those pronouns, but I notice that no one else has made the adjustment. As the supervisor of this team, how can I fix this situation?I feel like the longer I wait to address it, the more disrespectful and complicit I’m being. I can’t police people’s language, but I would call someone out for other kinds of behavior I interpreted as disrespectful. (For what it’s worth, I don’t suspect anyone of being intentionally disrespectful by not using their colleague’s preferred pronouns.) The nonbinary colleague has not said anything to me about this being a problem, but I have to assume it feels dismissive. I feel I owe them an apology, but what I really owe them is better leadership. What would you do?

The advice columnist whose record of often obnoxious woke certitude ended up eating the issue sufficiently to require two parts to the intended post, responded,

“Thank you for asking this question. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect and part of that is using people’s correct pronouns.”

“Correct pronouns?” Doesn’t correct mean “factual and true”? The requirement that individuals and groups get to demand and enforce what is correct is, I think, one more manifestation of the Left’s slide into a totalitarian mindset, and the tendency of the easily subjugated, weenies and the “oh. well, if they care so much, why fight it?” crowd to let societal freedom die a death of a thousand cuts. Ann quoted one of Gay’s commenters, who wrote,

I am really curious about this pronoun business in business communication. Who decided that the new law of the land is that everybody gets to pick their pronouns however misaligned they may be to their publicly visibly persona, and everybody else needs to learn this and memorize? Who has time for this?

Of course, it is not a matter of time, but a matter of ethics. It is an ethics conflict, in fact, one that involves a clash of manners, consideration, principles, respect, fairness, responsibility, and the abuse of power. It is ethical—fair, respectful, caring—to agree to call a friend, colleague or acquaintance by whatever name they wish to be called, within reason. Not all names are appropriate in all settings, however: a boss that asked to be called “Love Bug” or “Sex Machine” in the workplace is engaging in sexual harassment. Unethical. Would one have to call someone by her “correct” name if she insisted on the title, “Your Majesty”? That’s getting closer to the issue here. Such demands (a request is a demand if one will encounter negative consequences for rejecting it) are a power play; one relevant ethics question is whether the conduct is justifiable. I object to jumping through hoops on command: Ethics Alarms will capitalize the “b” in Black when the stars turn cold, just as I rejected the abomination “of color” the first time it raised its colorful head.

Writing about the pronouns issue a year ago, Althouse, who has raised the question a lot, ended one post, “Personally, I feel that anyone who feels the need to announce their pronouns is childish and rude, and I treat them as such.” That discussion covered whether requiring/demanding/requesting that someone adopt one’s counter-factual, eccentric or debatable choice of pronouns is forcing others to adopt an ideology they do not share.

Of course it is. That’s the whole point. Continue reading →

Update: So Kellyanne Conway’s Behind-The-Scenes White House Book Doesn’t Tell Negative Tales About Trump. It’s Still Unethical.

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In this recent post, Item #4, I pronounced “Here’s the Deal,” former Trump campaign manager, PR flack and advisor KellyAnne Conway’s 500 page memoir of her White House days, an unethical betrayal of trust and professional ethics. According to the Washington Post,, Conway’s “tell-all” doesn’t do her former boss dirt, just other co-workers, like Jared Kushner and Anthony Fauci.

This post is to make a clarification: It doesn’t matter. Conway is still cashing in, and her book is still unethical. Workplaces do not work without mutual trust, and that means that no one can be candid, honest and spontaneous while thinking that what they do or say might be made public by an undeclared spy, mole, or blabber-mouth. Those like Conway who write books and get them out before the main characters have retired, died or faded from memory damage the workplace, politics, government, and human relations. They are ethics corrupters. They are selfish, destructive, betrayers. All of them. It doesn’t matter whether their fame arose from politics, Hollywood, the business world, journalism or someplace else. Such authors betray the trust of others for their own gain, unless every single individual mentioned by name for what they said or did has given advance consent.

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Comment Of The Day: “You Didn’t Really Think That It Was Only The Catholic Church That Had This Problem, Did You?”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The post about the Southern Baptist Convention’s decades-long cover-up of child sexual abuse within its ranks provoked several illuminating comments.

Here is repeat Comment of the Day author John Paul on “You Didn’t Really Think That It Was Only The Catholic Church That Had This Problem, Did You?”:

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I am a minister in a Church of Christ. We are non-denominational, but as a whole we share a common belief system that tends to be the same from church to church. For those of you who aren’t familiar with what that means, it means that our core beliefs are the same, but each church operates under a group of people that are native to that church and meet the biblical requirements of elder.

I started my ministry back in 2004. Though I went to a college almost 500 miles from my hometown, I tried to get an internship at a local church that was associated with the Church of Christ in the town I grew up in. It came down to me and another young gentleman and while the church was kind to me, the reason they gave me for not giving me the job is that they did not want a local. Fair enough: I wished them luck and ended up taking a internship in a different state altogether.

I bring this up because less than 1.5 years later I returned to that church with my new wife for the Christmas holiday. The size was almost 1/2 less than I remembered and the general atmosphere was somber. We figured that many of the members were traveling like we were and we didn’t think much of it except at the very end of the service where worship was hi-jacked by the leadership (without letting the visitors know) to take a survey.

Question one: “What do you think we could have done better?” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Major League Baseball, As Usual

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The alternate headline would be “Now THIS is pandering!”

As discussed here, White Sox star shortstop Tim Anderson, an African-American, cried “Racism!” because Yankee third baseman Josh Donaldson mockingly called him “Jackie” during the last game between the teams, nearly provoking a “bench-emptying on-field brawl,” as it is typically called, that, also typically, never involved any actual fighting. By “Jackie” Donaldson was sarcastically referencing an ill-considered interview Anderson once gave in which he immodestly compared himself to the color-line shattering Hall of Famer. Needless to say (I hope) calling a black player “Jackie” after he has made an ass of himself by such a self-glorifying comparison isn’t racist. The proper term is “well-deserved.”

I wrote in the post, “Baseball has been a full participant in The Great Stupid, so don’t bet against it punishing Donaldson for “sarcasm that heightens racial sensitivities,” or something.” Bingo! That’s exactly what MLB did, setting a new high (low?) for weenie-ism and race pandering.

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