Sometimes I come across a piece that chimes readily with my own life experiences. I’ve worked for a number of different employers over the years but the more left leaning work environments were for me the ones that were least free and the most oppressive. They’ve also often had the most shrill, doctrinaire and ideologically driven bosses I have ever had. It’s horrible to work in an environment where every word or action in the workplace is policed for political correctness, where every action has to be measured against an arbitrary political scale of priorities. Open one’s mouth or make a suggestion that the management may worry could be seen as racist/sexist/transphobic etc, even though it makes business sense and the employee could find themselves bawled out at best or out of a job at worse.
My experience of how horrible left wing bosses can be seems not to be a singular one. Daniel Greenfield writing at Front Page Magazine details how bad it has become working for left leaning television programme teams. According to Mr Greenfield, the writers room for the sci fi series Start Trek Discovery appears to have been a bit of left wing bear-pit with massive amounts of bullying going on. There has had to be a change of showrunner on this programme due, according to reports in the Hollywood Reporter, to egregious bullying going on in the programme running team.
Daniel Greenfield remarked that places that mark themselves out as ‘progressive’ often are run by managers whose aggressive and bullying management practises would not be out of place in a mid 19th century sweatshop or even a Manchester cotton mill. Mr Greenfield quoting an article from the Hollywood Reporter said:
Out are Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts, who originally took over the role at the helm of the drama from Bryan Fuller…
Insiders also stress that Berg and Harberts became increasingly abusive to the Discovery writing staff, with Harberts said to have leaned across the writers room table while shouting an expletive at a member of the show’s staff. Multiple writers are said to have been uncomfortable working on the series and had threatened to file a complaint with human resources or quit the series altogether before informing Kurtzman of the issues surrounding Berg and Harberts. After hearing rumors of HR complaints, Harberts is said to have made imposing remarks to the staff to keep concerns with the production an internal matter.
So there is a bullying and verbal abuse problem in the programme creation team and the first response of HR and the alleged bullies themselves was to try to threaten employees to keep the matter internal and private. Now I know, as I have worked in them, that ‘creative’ environments can be tetchy and filled with emotion, you are often dealing with the products of the minds of those doing the creation and such people become very attached to these products. The creative fields also sometimes contain, let’s not mince words here, a bunch of primadonnas. There is bound to be a bit more argy bargy in a writing team than there would be in say a surgical team in a hospital, but what appears to have gone on with the Star Trek Discovery production team seems much much worse than that. The picture that Mr Greenfield and the Hollywood Reporter paint is that the media left have created a horrible place to work and one mired in bullying and aggressive behaviour by team leaders and others. I’ve little doubt that working on the writing team for something like Star Trek Discovery is fiscally rewarding, but a person would probably be treated better by their employer if they were shovelling manure on a farm somewhere. The Star Trek writers, as many others of us have discovered, that the more left wing the work environment, the more unpleasant the place is to work.
