Can We Refuse The Parts Of Our Jobs We Don’t Like?

Last week I wrote about Tamara Klopfenstein, the assistant who sued her former employers for sexual harassment because they asked her to fetch them coffee, and debated about whether or not we are allowed to refuse to carry out aspects of our jobs we do not like.

After coming across a recent article in the Seattle PI, I realized that this debate is alive and well and playing itself out in the Washington State court system. Pharmacists in both my hometown of Seattle, as well as across the country, are refusing to dispense the highly controversial birth control drug, Plan B.

According to the Washington Post:

The trend has opened a new front in the nation’s battle over reproductive rights, sparking an intense debate over the competing rights of pharmacists to refuse to participate in something they consider repugnant and a woman’s right to get medications her doctor has prescribed. It has also triggered pitched political battles in statehouses across the nation as politicians seek to pass laws either to protect pharmacists from being penalized — or force them to carry out their duties.

Setting aside the issues of abortion and reproductive rights, the real heart of this issue is can an employee refuse to carry out specific aspects of their job that they do not like?

What makes the pharmacists/Plan B debate especially inflammatory is that their refusal to act directly impacts the rights and well-being (so to speak) of others.

“We don’t have a profession of robots. We have a profession of humans. We have to acknowledge that individual pharmacists have individual beliefs,” said Susan C. Winckler, the [American Pharmacists] association’s vice president for policy and communications.

While I don’t think anyone on either side of this issue is advocating that people perform their jobs like robots with no room for compassion or common sense, we have to weigh the public responsibility of the pharmacy position (to dispense medications as requested) against individual freedom (to exercise free will).

Advocates for pharmacists’ rights argue that if refused their request for Plan B, customers can take their business elsewhere to one of many pharmacies that will fill the prescription. But many women’s rights advocates argue with equal fervor that any pharmacist with an objection to filling prescriptions of any kind can just as easily change professions to one that does not require them to make moral objections.

Where do we draw the line? Can pharmacists refuse to dispense AIDS drugs because they find homosexuality immoral? Can a Postal Carrier refuse to deliver issues of Playboy because they find pornography disgusting? Is it a violation of their civil rights to force them to do so?

Are there situations when the public good trumps private freedom?

The Patriot Act certainly thinks so, and for the time being, so does the Washington State district court.

Fetching Coffee as Sexual Harassment

Is asking your secretary to perform the act of fetching coffee, one of the modern office’s most mundane chores, an implied form of sexual harassment?

“Yes” is according to Tamara Klopfenstein of Levittown, NY.

Tamara’s story, first brought to my attention by Ask A Manager and covered in more depth by the Philadelphia Inquirer, highlights how delicate the relationship between boss and employee can be:

After working for a few weeks, her (male) bosses asked her to get their coffee for them. She declined, and her manager e-mailed her, saying: “This is not open for debate. Please don’t make an easy task a big deal.” Klopfenstein felt that getting coffee “reinforced outdated gender stereotypes,” so the next day, when she was asked to get coffee again, she sent an e-mail that read: “I don’t expect to serve and wait on you by making and serving you coffee every day.” Nine minutes later, she was fired. Klopfenstein promptly sued the company for sexual discrimination and sexual harassment. The judge ruled: “The act of getting coffee is not, by itself, a gender-specific act,” and dismissed the case. But Klopfenstein’s attorneys argue that “Some tasks are inherently more offensive to women.”

Ultimately, a federal court judge threw the case out due to lack of merit, which in my opinion, was the right call.

While a woman fetching coffee for her male bosses smacks of historical discrimination against women in the workplace, the Philadelphia Inquirer points out that,

To show discrimination, Klopfenstein would have had to be able to point to a male worker with a similar status who didn’t have to get coffee.

But the previous receptionists were all women and didn’t object to getting coffee for vice presidents Jay Shrager and Richard Blum, Jackson said.

Putting the harassment angle aside, the real issue at stake here is: can we refuse the parts of our jobs we don’t like?

Ms. Klopfenstein openly refused a directive from her bosses, to bring them coffee everyday at 3pm, something that all of her predecessors had willingly done in the past. Her bosses reiterated their request and explained that it was non-optional. Ms. Klopfenstein then refused to carry out an ‘essential’ (and I use this term loosely) job function and was fired.

I once watched a co-worker go through a similar battle. After several years of working at the company, she one day flat out refused to do half of her job duties—duties which were essential to the business. Management went out and hired a younger, cheaper replacement and a few months later let my co-worker go. Is it disappointing that an experienced employee was let go for a younger, cheaper version? Sure. But management hadn’t wanted to go out and hire someone new. By refusing to do her job, my co-worker forced management to make a choice, and can you really blame them for not wanting to be loyal to someone who “wasn’t a team player?”

I myself have had to do my fair share of grunt work outside the scope of my official job duties. One of the best bosses I ever had the pleasure to work for used to ask me to schedule department meetings for him. I wasn’t his assistant and I wasn’t the leader of the team, although I was in his department. Generally it was common practice for the leader of a meeting to schedule it themselves, so it felt weird that he would ask me to do something like that.

But did I do it willingly and without complaint? Of course.

For something as mundane as scheduling a meeting or fetching coffee, why start a war? Even if you don’t necessarily like doing boring tasks like copying, filing or delivering mail, someone has to do it and why risk ending up on your boss’ bad side over something so trivial? As Audrey Jackson, an administrative assistant at an engineering firm in Center City, put it:

“I would do anything for my boss except sleep with him, because he’s married,” she said.

Are Ivy-League Schools Just A Funnel For Wall Street?

Last week I wrote about a three-year old New York Times article featuring interviews with Ivy-League academics criticizing their female students’ choice to become stay-at-home mothers instead of members of a “diverse professional elite” upon graduation from their elite institutions.

One critic who was interviewed went so far as to question the value of educating females if their only goal was to become mothers:

“It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?” said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Coincidentally, that same Monday my post appeared, a new article surfaced in the New York Times, again tackling the issue of what is expected of today’s Ivy-League graduates. According to the article:

Professor Howard Gardner hopes…seminars will encourage more students to consider public service and other careers beyond the consulting and financial jobs that he says are almost the automatic next step for so many graduates of top colleges.

“Is this what a Harvard education is for?” asked Professor Gardner, who is teaching the seminars at Harvard, Amherst and Colby with colleagues. “Are Ivy League schools simply becoming selecting mechanisms for Wall Street?”

Interesting that a man is questioning whether students (male or female) belong in the boardroom and that a woman is advocating to put more women in it. Why is success always measured by job title and salary? Why are so many young people being blindsided into a handful of careers, simply because these careers are viewed as successful by a handful of adults?

After years of watching friends and family getting laid-off and overworked, many of today’s college students are questioning the true value of corporate life:

As Adam M. Guren, a new Harvard graduate who will be pursuing his doctorate in economics, put it, “A lot of students have been asking the question: ‘We came to Harvard as freshmen to change the world, and we’re leaving to become investment bankers — why is this?’ ”

The official word on the value and purpose of higher education comes from the President of Amherst (also male):

“We’re in the business of graduating people who will make the world better in some way,” said Anthony Marx, Amherst’s president. “That’s what justifies the expense of the education.”

If the purpose of an education is to help its recipients make the world a better place, does the role of parent not fulfill that purpose? Most universities claim that they are training the leaders of tomorrow, but why does their vision of leader stick so narrowly to the C-suite? Isn’t someone who cares for, educates, motivates and encourages considered a leader? Are mothers and fathers not the leaders of a family?

I think it’s time for the elder academics to stop wasting so much time on what their students are accomplishing after graduation and more time ensuring the quality of their education. Trust that the younger generation can decide their future for themselves and stop hovering over us like helicopter parents.