Asshole Bosses Should Be Fair Game

As someone who has been through the long, hard slog of job hunting, I consider myself something of an expert on job advice columns. You read them, you get advice solicited and unsolicited from others. Some of it is helpful. So much of it is bullshit.

One piece of advice is helpful, but bullshit at the same time. That is the advice to never talk poorly about your former places of work.

I understand that being negative about where you worked before makes you look like a complainy pants, and that the potential employer may not want to bring such negativity into their place. That makes perfect sense.

But let’s take, say, a really bad job for shits and giggles. Say your last job was shredding documents illegally for Enron, or digging mass graves in Bosnia. What the fuck are you supposed to be positive about? “It gave me a great appreciation for proper organization!”

I think part of me just has a bad gut reaction because if you do have a legitimately bad boss, you are supposed to lie about it. And that lie props up bad bosses everywhere. It gives bad bosses free reign to be dickholes to their employees, as long as they are being assholes to white male employees anyway. If you don’t read This Article  that sparked this blog entry, and you should, at least read this excerpt:

It is nearly impossible to successfully sue your boss for being a bully. While there are decades' worth of precedents on gender and race discrimination in the workplace, just being an all-around jerk is sanctioned boardroom behavior.

"The standard for outrageous conduct is so high that people lose those lawsuits," says Dr. Gary Namie, the director of the Workplace Bullying Institute. "Nothing is considered outrageous when committed by management."

So when it becomes OK to lie about your former places of work where you were let go because your asshole boss kept asking you to work 60 hours a week and one time you needed to attend a funeral and he waited an appropriate amount of time before firing you. When it becomes OK to lie about it, all bosses everywhere are protected species. This rule works out like gangbusters for former bosses, who have no reason to be reasonable. I've known people that think Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross is the model of a motivating boss. Not the personification of human pit stain.

I’ve lucked out in the boss department, I should say here. I’ve had good and not as good, but with the not as good ones I was in a position that I didn’t really have to interact with them more than a couple times a year. But luck should not give me an edge over others because I can be honest about what management styles work well with me.

And it rankles me that there’s a management class that can be assholes, not get called on it, and can still fuck your shit up when any employer calls for references.

It warms my heart that Minnesota courts are starting to reasonably explore the issue of office bullies, at least on the legal terms of keeping people safe from violent work environments. That’s something at least, and something that might get higher ups to care about more than just numbers, but how their middle managers get those numbers.