CHOPPY WATERS: With the election looming, water cooler talk can take a controversial turn. (
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CLOSE QUARTERS: It’s hard to keep your political allegiances to yourself in an open office. (
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Alex (declined to use his real name for career reasons), a copywriter at a major fashion label in the city, can’t wait for Election Day — and not just to see which candidate comes out on top. He’s more excited for his boss to quit the constant political interrogation that’s become the norm around his office.
“My boss first brought up politics as a mild joke,” he says. “He would bring in toilet paper and doggie bags with Obama’s face on them, and coffee mugs and key chains with Romney’s, and ask, during a meeting, which one you choose.”
But when Alex, an undecided voter, tried to dodge his die-hard conservative boss’s probes, the situation only escalated. First his boss called him “un-American” for not asserting his political views. Then he “threatened to withhold my expenses payback unless I told him who I was voting for,” Alex recalls. “It made me so pissed off I wanted to choke him with the Obama toilet paper.”
According to a CareerBuilder survey conducted earlier this year, 43 percent of US workers will (or already have at this point) discuss politics in the office this election season. And, with such a contentious face-off for the presidency, and the elections just over a week away, experts say that even elevator small talk has the potential to veer into the sort of uncomfortable, perhaps even illegal territory that Alex experienced.
Gregg Salka, a labor and employment attorney at Fisher & Phillips, says seemingly innocent political commentary can even be perceived as discriminatory or harassing. “When you start discussing one of the candidate’s views on immigration, for example, an individual might feel uncomfortable even if they’re not a part of the conversation,” he says. When an employer goes as far Alex’s did, strong-arming workers into engaging in political talk, he says it “could be a breeding ground for future lawsuits.” (Not to mention a surefire way to decrease employee morale and productivity.)
Salka also notes that political speech in private workplaces is not protected under the First Amendment, contrary to popular belief. In fact, according to a Society for Human Resources Management report, 25 percent of American employers have written policies about political activity in the workplace, with some banning political chatter altogether. “The safest route is to just not discuss political topics at all in the workplace,” Salka says.
Nicole Williams, a NYC-based career expert, agrees. “There are always going to be broad stereotypes that are pinned on a conservative or a liberal, so you don’t want [your co-workers’] perceptions of you to be blurred with the label ‘Democrat’ or ‘Republican’,” she says. “If you’re on the ‘wrong’ side, they can really presume things about you that aren’t true.”
But at many offices around the city, political discussion is impossible to avoid — and more often than not results in at least some level of frustration or unease. Glenn Nocera, 37, the lone conservative on the Brooklyn College Police squad (and the president of the Brooklyn Young Republican Club) says his co-workers’ vocal support of Obama can “annoy the heck out of me.”
Their heated debates have yet to reach the point where the colleagues “want to punch each other” but, the Kensington resident says, “we secretly do.”
For ad exec Lauren Ikin, a self-described “unabashed social liberal,” things get uncomfortable when office talk turns to touchy social issues like abortion and gay rights.
“Sometimes you realize that you work with people who don’t share your core values,” says the 29-year-old Astoria resident. “Those kinds of debates can really hurt.”
And when tensions arise? “You have to agree to disagree and frankly not bring it up again,” she says. “You never want to put your foot in your mouth.”
But some, like Dane Atkinson, think a little political debate can be healthy. The CEO of SumAll, a digital start-up in SoHo, says his employees often voluntarily engage in “rampant [political] conversation” during lunch hour.
It’s “a great way to learn about each other, as long as we stay sensitive to other people’s emotions,” he says.
Still, the safest bet is keeping your political views to yourself, whenever possible. That’s what one conservative senior manager at a consumer-goods company tried to do when his colleague kept inviting him to black-tie fund-raiser events for the president’s reelection, unaware that he wasn’t a supporter. “Why open yourself to a heated debate that lasts for days, not hours?” he says. “There’s a reason there’s a curtain at the voting booth.”
—Additional reporting by Virginia Backaitis.