I am using this blog entry to tell about a recent personal experience that has left me angry and quite frankly, just plain surprised. Basically, I was publicly harassed on a business’s Instagram page through no fault of my own. Before I write about this experience, I want to touch on some key aspects of this situation: managing conflict, need for diversity training, and the need for resources for employees to manage harassment.
I work in coffee. I have been in craft coffee for 10 years and it’s one of my passions. I have worked everywhere, from State College, PA, Pittsburgh, PA, Boulder, CO, and Denver, CO- to name a few. I love the craft and training your palate to taste the different roast profiles has always been an interest of mine. In February, I moved back to Denver from PA and I quickly found a job at an aesthetically great shop through an old friend. I worked there for two weeks before quarantine. I was planning to quit because they were awful in general, but before I got a chance to, they had to let me go because of COVID-19. They also let go of my friend who got me the job. Fast forward to a couple of months later when I received a text from a friend in the Denver coffee community saying that she had posted an anonymous comment on a recent post of theirs calling them out for lying about lay-offs. (She was also a previous employee and an acquaintance of mine.) This post had spoken two lies: 1) they kept 100% of their employees during COVID-19 and 2) that they were a company dedicated to diversity. The business then started slandering my name across their public platform, even though 1) they had no proof that it was me and 2) it literally wasn’t me. (During all of this, I was on a Zoom call with a PSU group and had no idea what was happening.) My only guess as to why they felt so sure it was me was because I was indeed an employee who got laid off during the pandemic and they felt threatened that I was trying to expose their lie. They baselessly slandered my name and kept tagging me in posts that had the anonymous user and my handle in the same post. They told me that I was probably a part of a group of “white privileges.” I am not even white and they knew this. They just said it to make it seem that I didn’t fit their diverse narrative. Long story short, another owner from the Denver coffee community saw their comments and reached out to me and the anonymous user, who revealed themselves to her, and offered to help us write a call-to-action packet. We gathered 3 different accounts of racial discrimination and sexual harassment from other former employees. (Just as an example: all employees who gave us their accounts said something about being told by management to “ask Arabs to leave because their perfume is too strong”). While we spent a great deal of time putting this packet together- which included all the screenshots, accounts from former employees, and a call-to-action plan- we were met with nothing. They didn’t reply to us at all. We sent it to their wholesale company Intelligencia and they all but dismissed our written discrimination experiences with “we have spoken with them and they hold that they are committed to diversity.” We were left with nothing but hopelessness because there was nowhere else to turn except costly litigation.
Circling back to the three important aspects- conflict management, diversity training, and employee resources outside of HR. Managing conflict does not have to be hard. Gamble and Gamble (2013) outline some destructive management conflict behaviors enacted by businesses: Attacking the other person, Acting defensively, Stonewalling, and Communicating contempt. In my case, the company (whose name is AVIANO) displayed all four. They attacked me by making untrue accusations, acting defensively by threatening me with proof (that didn’t exist), stonewalling me by ignoring my comments to them asking me where it was coming from, and communicating contempt by bringing race into the discussion (Gamble & Gamble, 2013). This public display of actions was all but constructive. Instead of trying to resolve their notion of me being the anonymous user by reaching out to me privately, they based their decision to defile my name on hearsay.
Diversity also comes into play here; more specifically- Ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to see your culture as superior to another (Gamble & Gamble, 2013). Ethnocentricity comes from, to put it plainly, ignorance. I wholeheartedly believe that intolerance of another’s customs or regarding how an individual from another culture expresses themselves comes from the fear of not knowing. In the case I just described, even from many other perspectives, the owners of this business held prejudice against others. As I mentioned before, I am not white, but they chose to call me a privileged white so they could help their narrative. In the 3 other accounts, management used the words “Muslum, Arab, and Islam” interchangeably. In our packet, we included a call-to-action for them to incorporate diversity training into their workplace. To no avail, of course. Which brings me to my last point.
Businesses are in a position of power, as they provide goods and services to the public. “Power is influence!” (Gamble & Gamble, 2013, p. 185). Gamble and Gamble (2013) outline different types of power. Coercive power threatens people to conform and will only result in a negative manner in the long run. Rather than use their platform for good, Aviano chose to ignore their lie and instead publicly attack someone innocent after their lie was publicly brought to their attention. When this happens, there is little left for that person to do, other than court. While experiencing this, we explored the idea of putting the screenshots on our personal accounts and exposing them. Personally, my audience isn’t big enough to make a difference because I don’t use social media often. Even so, this might not have made as big of an impact as I wanted it to. There are so many people in similar situations to this, whose stories get swept under the rug, or whose stories never get told for fear of retaliation. Inclusion and cultural differences should absolutely be included in any business model. In instances like this, the bullied get beat down and the bully continues to be a bully and own a business. Employees need resources to air these types of grievances where they will be received in a serious manner.