War talk at work breeding tension
By Kirstin Downey and Amy Joyce
Washington Post
For Eileen Krauze, the final straw came Wednesday.
That was when her boss, Pat Elder, the owner of a title company and an avid anti-war activist, took over her computer to blast-fax information about an upcoming protest. Left standing amid a pile of land records, Krauze quit on the spot and stormed out of the building.
"I couldn't handle it anymore," said Krauze, 49, a resident of Calvert County, Md., and a strong supporter of the war in Iraq. "The only way a country can stay free is to fight for its freedom."
Elder said he regretted Krauze's decision and will miss her, calling her "a good lady."
"It's a very difficult situation, very taxing," he said. "But I can't just go to work and make money. I need to be concerned about my community. I have a duty to the world community."
Nationwide, as workers crowd around office television sets or check Internet news sites for updates, war-time tensions are spilling into the workplace, according to human resources executives and employee assistance counselors.
"We are seeing an increasing number of reports from managers and employees alike regarding disruptive discussions of war at work," said Richard Chaifetz, head of ComPsych Corp., a Chicago-based employee-assistance management company. Call volume to his clients' employee-assistance programs has surged 22 percent from a year ago, he said, as co-workers cope with anxiety and anger over world affairs.
"Everyone in the country is concerned about what's going on," he said.
Some experts said companies should invite debate about the war into the office, even if it creates friction.
In most cases, managers should not try to stop political conversation around the water cooler, said Ane Powers, a career coach with the White Hawk Group in Washington, D.C.
"Managers have to understand their employees are nervous, and one way of dealing with that is to talk with friends and colleagues," she said.
Many employers believe it is important, even an issue of safety, for workers to keep up with the news.
At Verizon Communications Inc., for example, employees have several options for catching up on the news: the Web, an internal television network to access CBS News, and e-mails from the company.
"People are having lots and lots of different discussions. They are making observations left and right," said Grace Dobson, a retirement specialist in Verizon's human resources department.
Greg Fontaine, president of Jaspin Interactive Inc., a provider of Internet and online business services in Dulles, Va., said his five-person firm has had some tense lunches lately.
"There's certainly been some heated lunch discussion between those who think what's being done is right and appropriate and those who think otherwise," he said. "We're a small enough group where I don't think it's going to cause problems. But there is some vocal disagreement."
Some workers have reacted negatively to others' expressions of their political views.
John Lovaas, a retired senior foreign service officer who now works for a publishing company in Tysons Corner, regularly posts anti-war information on the window of his cubicle. One article discussed how much profit Halliburton Co. — the company where Dick Cheney was chief executive before becoming vice president of the United States — might make in Iraq after the war. Another contained information on a protest.
Recently, he said, someone has been entering his office at night and tearing up his posted materials, throwing the shredded fragments into the trash. So he taped a note to a posting, asking the shredder, who he believes is a co-worker in the sales department, to speak with him face to face about the dispute.
"I'm not 100 percent sure who it is," he said, "but this guy really annoys me."
William Bollinger, president of Ocala, Fla.-based National Background Data LLC, which does employee background checks, decided Thursday morning to show his support for the president and the war by sharing an e-mail urging a boycott of French products with 1,000 of his colleagues and clients. He said 95 percent of the responses he received were positive, but he has received several angry responses as well.
"One guy, obviously of French descent, took it personally," he said, while another person responded that it was the "most ignorant, ill-informed and anti-American message" she had ever received. Even so, he said, "I felt the need to do it."
Some people say they feel silenced by the strong opinions they hear voiced around them.
A woman who works in the Washington area and wished to remain anonymous said the anti-war rhetoric at work makes her feel tense because she has family members who are serving in the military. She said she is in the minority at her office, with many people opposing the action in Iraq.
"Politics — and in particular Bush and the war with Iraq — are increasingly the topic for casual conversations at the office," she said via e-mail. "It also occasionally seeps into meetings and more formal work settings. I often feel 'surrounded' and when the conversations and jokes start, I generally just keep my mouth shut in order to avoid conflict — particularly since my boss is one of the more vocal members of the group."
She said she has thought about asking that political discussions be left out of the office but fears that such an approach would be the same as saying she disagrees with her co-workers.
"In a small work group like ours it would be disastrous," she said.
