@bidicus*maximus wrote:
All of this business about pronouns seems silly to me when, "he" and "she" should suffice as general terms based on what you were born as. Much like when, "man" is used instead of, "human" and refers to both men AND women. Being so touchy as to require the rest of the world to bow down and use the pronoun that YOU prefer seems like a person is feeling more than a bit entitled, to me.
As to the question that is really being asked, about how far a person should be allowed to express their own opinions at work, my opinion is, "not far at all"... especially if your opinions are in conflict with those of your employer. Express your opinions on your own time, not while you are being paid to do your job. I think that people tend to forget that while they are at work, they are the servant of their employers. They are always free to seek employment elsewhere.
I would agree with that, except I think it does get tricky if for some people it becomes a matter of morality.
I used to teach and quite frankly, I thought some of the stuff we had to do was ridiculous but I did it anyway because it wasn't against my principles as such, just not the best use of my time (in my opinion). eg, being told I was teaching Indonesian to my class from the next week onwards. I knew not one word of Indo, nor did most of my colleagues.
But I think when it comes to asking people to do something that goes against their moral grain, sometimes employers can tweak things to accommodate an otherwise good worker.
Some other examples, say you have Jewish person who doesn't want to work from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. You may be able to work rosters around that.
Or an example from around here, a Muslim man who didn't want to handle alcohol or pork in his supermarket job.
Or someone with dyslexia and poor maths skills who can't work on registers because that person can't reliably count out change, but who can work brilliantly in eg the bakery section.
Masybe we can't always accommodate every person but with religious or moral beliefs, if we can, then why not?
