Can We Stop Pretending Toxic Workplaces Are Normal?
The only reason they stay that way is because we put up with it
“Do you get skim milk because you’re trying to be sexy?”
I wasn’t sure I heard it right the first time she told me. My coworker was pulling on her coat, looking awkward and uncomfortable as I handed her drink over the counter.
She’d just gotten off of her afternoon shift and I was only just starting mine. Our boss had left an hour or so before, so it was just me and our supervisor for the rest of the day.
She was only a teenager. A minor, working two jobs at the mall in the hopes of moving out of her mom’s house as soon as she was old enough to get her own place.
On her way out the door to clock in at her second job, she was telling me about an interaction she had had with our boss the day before. This grown man — a married man who had a kid older than her — had prepared her free drink before she left the coffee shop for the day.
She asked for skim milk instead of 2%.
“Do you get skim milk because you’re trying to be sexy?” He had asked the minor who worked for him.
To say I saw red would be an understatement. To say that kind of behaviour was unexpected would be a lie.
I had already noticed a few things about my boss at the time. As soon as he took over hiring responsibilities, there was a shift in the coffee shop’s aesthetic. I was one of the first he took on, so I didn’t spot it right away.
Pretty soon, almost all of the workers on my shift were small brunette women. The only employees who didn’t fit the same mold were the old guard supervisors, and two guys who were hired before the boss took over.
It was one of the guys who pointed it out, and once we saw it, we couldn’t unsee it.
There were other things he did that, looking back, were obviously red flags. There was the time we were slammed with a long line of customers, but he was goofing off trying to take selfies with us — all the women — and showing us pictures he took of previous female employees at his old workplace.
And yet when the shift was mostly men, you couldn’t find him; he’d be off doing inventory in the back or checking the shelves and arranging merchandise somewhere else.
There was the time he hired a new manager, a young woman from China. She was sweet and she wanted to do a good job, but she had never had a management position and didn’t know what she was doing. She was a recent immigrant and still learning English, and she told me tearfully that she was stressed and didn’t enjoy the work.
She was much happier when another supervisor bullied our boss into moving her down a rung to work the coffee bar with us.
Why was she hired for management? What were her qualifications? I don’t know.
But I do know she was very pretty, and he spent a lot of time trying to chat with her during the work day.
Toxic workplaces are one of those things that we tend to shrug at as a society.
We all know retail work is a low-paying hellscape. Women and feminine-presenting people deal with a lot of really creepy behaviour from customers on top of the garden-variety rudeness that everybody deals with.
We all know the caricature of the overbearing jerk of a boss looming over our shoulders and dominating the office. Pizza parties in place of pay raises is a joke that always lands well because it’s just so true.
We expect customers to treat us like trash, to be talked down to, and to not have our time off respected. That’s just as true here in Canada as in the U.S.A. It’s hard to disconnect and rest when you expect to be torn down for it when you come back. Or worse, given extra hours to ‘make up’ for it.
That’s hustle culture, baby. Grind, grind, grind!
We’re conditioned by collective acceptance to expect abuse as just another part of the job. It’s totally normalized; we see it in our favorite shows and movies, we see memes about it online, we see people venting about bad workdays on social media all the time.
Worst of all, we’re so pressured to focus on success at work that we’re far too willing to accept harassment, even sexual harassment, just to avoid rocking the boat.
That’s assuming there’s even a reliable avenue to report it, or that your workplace will take action to make it stop.
How many times have you heard some variation of, “It’s just a joke,” or “Get a thicker skin,” or “It seems like this was just a misunderstanding,” when you try to report harassment or abuse at work?
Rather than deal with the complicated and confrontational process of trying to get help from your company, it’s easier to just bear it in silence. Or, as so many who make those workplaces awful would suggest, just go looking for a different job.
And then whoever gets hired after us gets to wade through the same muck. Assuming, of course, that you manage to find a better situation somewhere else.
It can be really hard to find somewhere with a better system and comparable pay. Plenty of people wind up staying at their toxic company until they burn out.
Our mental and physical health is all too often sacrificed at the altar of ‘being a team player.’
During the pandemic, a lot of people had this realization. With extended time at home, time to rest and reflect, workers across many industries were confronted with a new epiphany.
Work doesn’t actually need to suck. There’s no reason for work culture to be so bad, and so toxic, and life is better when you don’t have to grind your bones to dust to scrape minimum wage.
It’s pretty great when you have space and time to recuperate and you don’t have to put up with abuse. Is it any wonder that the Great Resignation rolled over the world with such an impact?
All at once, a lot of people were confronted with the life they’d been living, beyond the buzzwords and cult indoctrination of company culture.
It’s super telling how quickly a lot of corporations panicked and tried to spin things, too. Remember ‘Quiet Quitting?’
Remember how we were consistently warned that it would ruin our chances of advancement at work? Remember how it was portrayed as slacking off and not giving it your all?
Young workers responded by providing a more accurate translation of the term: Placing value on living your life and performing only those duties listed in your job description. You know — the things you were hired to do, instead of the extra responsibilities your boss just expected you to carry for no extra pay.
It’s a ridiculous expectation that workers have to go above and beyond, and take on added responsibilities to prove their value to their jobs. Even when they do, they aren’t properly compensated for it.
Is it any wonder that support for union membership and workplace strikes have exploded since the Summer of the Strike? It’s telling that in spite of the rising support and desire for unionization, union membership is going down.
Companies are working harder than ever to block them from organizing. They’re scared. And frankly, they should be; unions are powerful. They teach people the value and the strength of collective bargaining.
People have shaken themselves out of their stupor and taken a proper look around. Most of them really don’t like what they’re seeing.
Workers banding together to demand better conditions is an effective strategy. Refusing to put up with exploitation is how you put a stop to it.
Workers are no longer interested in letting things slide, or simply enduring the status quo. Refusing to ignore toxicity is how you make change happen.
“Do you get skim milk because you’re trying to be sexy?”
When my coworker told me what our boss said to her, I called our supervisor over right away. I encouraged her to tell him what happened.
Watching our normally jovial friend turn cool out of nowhere was satisfying. He told her, in no uncertain terms, that she needed to go talk to our boss’ boss first thing in the morning.
We worked in a small café at the back of a large franchise bookstore. Our boss managed the coffee shop. His boss managed the entire building.
Sure enough, the next morning our minor coworker came to work with a nervous smile and a look of relief.
Not long after, our boss’ boss came storming down the aisles of the bookshop looking like an avenging goddess. Typically sweet, chipper and warm, she looked like she was going to bring the building down in a hail of thunder and rage.
She asked if our boss was in. He was. She went to the back where he was working on the inventory for our next order.
They emerged only a moment later, and we all stood and watched them walk by the counter without even glancing in our direction.
She escorted him back to her office looking like a frightened puppy. She might as well have been his mother, hauling him out by the ear after he misbehaved at school.
I don’t know what she said to him, but his behaviour shaped up quite a bit afterward.
I’d have preferred if his predatory attitude had gotten him fired, but it wasn’t long before he quit the company and moved on anyway. Regardless, the message our young coworker learned was a good one.
She had the right to stand up for herself and expect better treatment at work.
More importantly, we learned a lesson that day, too. We older women were rolling our eyes and ignoring the boss at his bullshit, putting up with it like we put up with asshole customers and leering eyes from the public.
We didn’t report it because to us, it was normal. It was expected. A typical toxic workplace, with typical toxic problems. The guys were the same way; they disliked his antics too, but he was our boss. They checked in with us to see if we were okay but none of us did anything about it.
But when he turned his attention to a young girl, someone who was not yet jaded and who we knew damn well needed protection, it broke us out of our stupor. She timidly told me what was going on, and in that instant I knew something needed to be done.
I knew — we all knew — that it wasn’t okay.
It was never okay.
We don’t have to sit quietly and take it when we’re not being respected. We don’t need to meekly accept harassment or exploitation. We don’t have to endure bad treatment as a normal part of having a job.
The only reason workplaces get to be so toxic is that we don’t raise hell when they are.
Solidarity wins.
You're right that workplaces can hold some tricky stuff. I wish that raising hell always looked something like your example-- Immediate response from a boss is great. Imagine now that this boss was a man. Your results may not have looked the same. In my experience- the impossible manoeuvering and the requirement of unions to lay your whole self out to raise a valid concern about a fellow union member is tedious, mentally and emotionally draining and often results in hand pats or worse...no result. It's often too hard on us persoanlly to raise hell. We weigh the options and choose hunkering down, focussing on tasks and relationships that are healthy and getting home. I wish I could have been a catalyst to erase some of the toxicity that created real barriers to creativity, joy and community at my last workplace.
Not all workplaces make it easy to stop the toxic.
It reminds me of when I was in grad school and was working part time as a bank teller. The bank was involved in merger talks with a bigger bank, and they were money conscious.
One Saturday, we had gotten 12 inches of snow, but the bank announced that they were still open. So I drove (carefully) to the branch and we opened on time (luckily I lived down the street). Half an hour later, we got a call from the regional manager telling us to close and go home. I filled out the time sheet with the full hours I was scheduled, and went back home.
On Monday, I went in for my afternoon shift after class, and looked at the time sheet to sign it. They had changed the times for everyone on Saturday to only get 30 minutes pay. I refused to sign it and immediately called HR. After explaining the situation, the HR manager told me that we legally had to be paid for our full shift since we had come in. The branch manager told us that until she heard otherwise, we were only to register the half hour.
The next afternoon, I went in and was told that the regional manager had gone in and told everyone that they were getting the full day’s pay. He then had me transferred to another branch, one that was closing due to the merger. However, I was leaving anyway since I had accepted a teaching position.