WHEN YES MEANS NOTHING BUT NO CAN KILL YOU
The sudden departure of Nine Entertainment Chief Executive, Hugh Marks, is another nail in the coffin for any kind of non-professional relationship in the office. This is sad in two ways. The first, that work has been one of the safest places to meet your future life partner: the opportunity to watch from a distance, while deciding whether your Sales colleague is a bunny-boiling Rosemary West, or the cute guy in Accounts Payable, a bookish Ted Bundy, waiting to pounce.
The second sadness — any personal relationship in the office is now a potential career death sentence. Whether between consenting adults is neither here nor there. Either side can change their mind and withdraw consent at any time — perhaps weeks, months, years later. Or undermine it by retrospectively claiming they felt uncomfortable or forced into it.
We’ve also now seen a version of this play out in Canberra, where carousing between politicians and their staff is now verboten — and worse — a looming re-election graveyard.
There’s no doubt some bosses — mostly male, but no doubt female as well — have treated the office as a happy hunting ground for conquest. The big change? The office is now such a legal minefield, relationships may need to spiral down to no more than wary formality.
Australia has more than 76,000 lawyers. Not all of them are content to draw up wills, or pretend they’re looking after the legals for your house sale, while the work is actually done by a low paid clerk behind the scenes.
The big bucks are often in litigation, where fees can run into the millions. It cannot have escaped their attention that workplace relations is a fast-growing area for lucrative advice and (hopefully bitterly contested) courtroom battles. After all, one US observer now rates Australia the second most litigious country in the world.
The net of this is simple and terrifying. Any communication between workmates is the raw material for a complaint to Personnel. Their inevitable hair-trigger response? An investigation, accompanied by white hot office gossip, and very often, the end of a job and possibly a career. This is particularly true of male/female relationships, but that’s an increasingly old fashioned combination in a world where every romantic pairing is now on the cards.
If you were a manager, perhaps you might go for a drink with the guys after work. But your female colleagues? Anybody for a Tequila Slammer? I don’t think so. What about one on one with a subordinate of the opposite sex? Would you insist on a room with glass walls — and a witness for every discussion? If you think this conclusion is too harsh, why not call your local Federal member and ask how life might change after the ABC recently lifted the lid on life in the Canberra bubble.
Australia is being re-shaped by the consequences of legal risk. Ever wonder why the boss no longer buys the drinks at the Christmas party? After all, your post party car accident, while you’re disgracefully over the limit. That's surely his fault, isn't it?
And it’s not true just at the office. Several years ago, an enterprising software company launched a sexual consent app on mobile phones. Both parties, it was hoped, would pause their amorous activities and sign the consent, secure in the knowledge that any legal risk was now safely behind them.
But there are numerous examples of subsequently withdrawn consent: “I felt pressured”. “I was drunk”. “I think he/she/they gave me a pill”. “I’m sure I said No at some stage”. “I don’t recall, but I never would have said Yes”. In any event, the app simply faded away.
Meanwhile New South Wales is considering changing the law so a person could be convicted of rape even if they genuinely believed their partner had consented to sex.
All of this advances us ever closer to a looming sexual apartheid, where any interacton across the gender line is just fraught with way too much legal risk. It’s what happens when Yes means nothing and No can kill you.
I’m #philackman and this is a #philackmanarticle originally to air on #cairnsfm891