A new kind of discrimination seems to be hitting the American workplace: anti-Trump bias in hiring.
Paul Bedard of the Examiner reports on a new survey by the marketing firm Airtasker finds that 1 in 5 managers will refuse to hire somebody who supports President Trump.
The majority of managers said they would not discriminate against a Trump backer, but the percentage who would not is worth considering:
Given that Trump represents the Republican Party, it came as no surprise that many more right-leaning hiring managers said they would hire a candidate who supported him (57%), while just 9% said they would not.
And that’s not to say that left-leaning respondents felt the opposite: 56% said they didn’t care either way, and another 24% said they would hire a Trump supporter.
A moderate 20% would refuse, however.
Employees already on staff who support Trump face mockery, according to the survey:
Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they watched their colleagues crack jokes about someone who said they backed President Trump, and 23% observed people being both overly critical and making assumptions about that person’s character.
A potential employee’s opinions on race and gender can also factor into a hiring decision:
The majority of hiring managers said it was important to understand a candidate’s stance on racial equality (65%), gender equality (59%), and LGBTQ+ rights (54%). Another 38% felt the same about immigration, and 32% would want to know about an applicant’s politics,” said the survey analysis.
It added: “While not as many hiring managers actually turned away a job seeker based on a strongly held belief, each of these controversial topics led to some level of rejection: For example, 29% of hiring managers vetoed a candidate for his or her stance on racial equality, and 27% did so for gender equality.”
The survey included slightly more than 800 respondents.
While racism offends all decent people, the idea that support for a duly elected president could prevent somebody from being hired is an indication that maybe we need to tone it down on political animosity.