Month: March 2017

TRUMP’S REAL ART OF THE DEAL: DON’T NEGOTIATE, BLOVIATE

One of the biggest boasts behind last fall’s election died suddenly last week. Now buried in the Republican Graveyard of Wishful Thinking is the congenitally defective assertion that Donald Trump is a master negotiator.

“There’s going to be health insurance for everybody,” the new president declared in January, insisting it will cost far less than it does now. Asked how Trump could be so confident of those claims, his resident sycophant, Sean Spicer, had a quick-but-ludicrous answer: “He knows how to negotiate great deals.”

Nothing is ever final in Washington, but hopefully the Republican healthcare debacle of 2017 has forever put an end to the utter foolishness that Donald Trump is a world class negotiator. The guy huffed and puffed his way through real estate sales, insulting, assaulting or suing anyone who got in his way. That’s not a skillset that translates into effective leadership on the world stage.

Yet, there is this lingering myth, a distorted caricature, of what an effective negotiator looks like, and the composite, unfortunately, bears a strong resemblance to guys like Trump: a loud, brash, boorish, bullying slug who pounds the table while lobbing loud threats and insults. The archetype represents an archaic bargaining style that was occasionally effective in limited circumstances involving one-shot transactions and no ongoing relationship. It has absolutely no application to resolving conflict with Congress or foreign leaders.

Here, thanks to Politico’s reporting, is all you have to know to conclude that President Donald J. Trump is a terrible negotiator: In a last ditch effort to change the minds of conservative House Republicans, Trump The Closer summoned the 30-some members of the Freedom Caucus to the Cabinet Room of the White House.

Although these folks had been a thorn in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s side, they liked Trump and were excited about the opportunity to get the president to make some changes in the healthcare bill in exchange for their support. They thought they could deal with him. After all, he knew how to negotiate. So they laid out their problems and sent some clear signals about what needed to be changed and why it mattered to them. And here is what the master negotiator told them: “Forget about the little shit. Let’s focus on the big picture here.” The “big picture”, Trump told them, was that the bill’s failure could imperil his reelection chances in 2020. Self-absorption might have served The Donald well in his mogul life, but it’s one of the worst traits a negotiator can bring to the table.

I don’t profess to be an expert on legislative negotiations but, over a career of more than 30 years, I helped bargain hundreds of contracts in the news industry. In order to get a deal, I had to know everything I could about the little shit. I wallowed in the little shit because somewhere in all that excrement was a key that would unlock the door to settlement. Obviously, I had to know what was important to our side, but I also needed to know management’s issues and what it needed in an agreement. That was the only route to a resolution that would have value for both sides.

Most negotiations are long and drawn out. Arguments are repeated ad nauseam, and it often appears that agreement will never be reached. There are, however, rare moments when the parties tire of the conflict and really want a deal. A good negotiator knows how to recognize those moments and seize them. Trump had that opportunity in the meeting with the Freedom Caucus and he totally blew it. Not only that, he blew it for the worst reason imaginable: he didn’t understand any of the issues. He acknowledged he was “not up on everything” in the bill. Hardly the mark of a master negotiator.

In his much touted book, “The Art of the Deal”, Trump offers this pearl of wisdom on his style of conflict resolution: “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.” If he doesn’t get what he wants, he says he walks away and gets it someplace else. That might work for building casinos and hotels, but it’s a recipe for disaster in government. Trump views a negotiation as a zero-sum transaction, one that produces a winner and a loser. Virtually all of the academic literature on effective dispute resolution rejects that approach (here, here and here). Effective negotiating in an ongoing relationship – which is to say 95% of all negotiations – means doing the very things Trump disdains. For example: show respect for the other side; never lie; forget about an “amazing” deal so you can focus on getting one that works for all sides; try to overcome mistrust; find a way to let everyone win a little; and help your adversary save face if they back down on an issue.

Obviously, those of us appalled at the prospect of 24 million Americans losing health insurance, can find easy solace in the president’s incompetence as a negotiator. Sadly, the feeling won’t last long. If this guy can’t find common ground with members of his own party, what happens when he takes on Iran, North Korea, China , or other hot spots? With a bag of tricks consisting of aiming high, pushing and walking out when you don’t get your way, don’t count on world peace anytime soon.

LOOKING FOR THE REAL MEANING OF IT ALL? CHECK THE PUNCTUATION

Our daily news diet now brings us scintillating reports on the Oxford comma and the meaning of quotation marks. What a delightful spring diversion from a depressingly bleak winter of Trump atrocities. Punctuation has always generated a level of electric excitation and enthusiasm on a par with, say, a convention of actuaries. Aside from small cohorts of passionate grammarians, reveling in the nuances of commas and the elegance of a well-placed ellipsis, most of us have paid little attention to the subject since we left middle school.

That was obviously our mistake, for punctuation is power. Just ask those Maine truck drivers for Oakhurst Dairy who are about to pick up a ton of overtime pay thanks to a comma that wasn’t there. They were the heroes of the Oxford comma story that made headlines these past few days. In case you missed it, check the link if you want to wander into the weeds of sentence structure. Otherwise this abbreviated Cliff note ought to do: The drivers went after four years of unpaid overtime. The company said the they were exempt under state law. The judge ruled them eligible for the time-and-a-half pay on the basis of a missing comma in the statute. Every demeaned English teacher in Maine suddenly had a perfect answer to their students’ question of, “Why do we have the learn this stuff?”.

Even Trump jumped on the punctuation bandwagon this week. When his lie about Obama wiretapping him went up in flames, the president suddenly turned into a strict language constructionist. He noted that he placed quote marks around “wiretapped” in his accusatory tweet. In The Donald’s style book, such punctuation expands the word’s meaning to include any form of surreptitious eavesdropping, from an ear against a door to, as his faithful whisperer Kellyanne Conway suggested, a microwave oven.

If punctuation has the power to turn a wiretap into a microwave, it is nothing to be trifled with. The truth of the matter is that punctuators have forever left their marks on our perpetual search for meaning. For example:

• The use of a comma instead of a dash caused the most expensive typographical error in congressional history. The Tariff Act of 1872 listed specific goods that were to be exempt from the import tax. Congress had intended to place “fruit-plants” on the tax exempt list, but the final version of the law used a comma instead of a dash: “fruit, plants,” instead of “fruit-plants”. As a result, no tax could be collected on fruit or plants of any kind. The loss of revenue amounted to $40 million in today’s dollars.

• A semicolon in the Texas Constitution invalidated an election and ignited a mass revolt. An angry and unstable Reconstructionist governor, obsessed with succession, was defeated by a Democrat in 1873. The legislature had changed the voting from four consecutive days in each county seat to one day in each precinct. That modification was the basis for the Texas Supreme Court to throw out the election. Because of a semicolon’s placement in the constitution’s election language, the justices said the legislature could change the voting venue but not the length of the polling period. Texans were so outraged that they rioted in the streets. The anger lingered for decades and the justices who wrote the decision were forever referred to as the “Semicolon Court.” According to a piece written for the Notre Dame Law Review, Texas lawyers to this day are so ashamed of the “Semicolon Decision” that they refuse to cite it as a legal authority.

• A million dollar comma brought a pair of Canadian communication giants to court. Rogers and Bell Aliant entered into a business contract that was to last five years and for subsequent terms of five years after that, “unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.” Bell tried to end the deal with a one-year notice shortly after the contract was signed. Rogers said the agreement could only be terminated after five years. The initial finding was in favor of Bell, based on the placement of a comma. Through the wonders of bilingualism, however, Rogers won the day. Turns out that the contract was prepared in both English and French and the latter version was missing the comma.

• A missing comma won a not guilty verdict for a Columbus, Ohio woman who left her pickup truck on a city street for more than 24 hours. Andrea Cammelleri, obviously paid attention in her English class. According to the Columbus Dispatch, she told the judge that the ordinance banning daylong parking covers “any motor vehicle camper, trailer, farm implement. . .” The judge agreed that the lack of a comma after “motor vehicle,” necessarily excludes pickup trucks from the ban. Case dismissed.

• Another comma that wasn’t there continues to keep records on police shootings private in Tennessee. The state’s bureau of investigation looked into the fatal shooting of a 19-year-old black man by a white Memphis police officer. The Memphis City Council issued a subpoena for the bureau’s case files. A judge looked at the statutory language dealing with police shootings. It says such records can be released “only in compliance with a subpoena or an order of a court of record.” The ruling? Because the clause is lacking a comma, both the subpoena and the order must come from a court, not a city council or other non-judicial authority. For lack of a comma, the records remain sealed.

In another generation or two, all of this comma and semicolon stuff may go the way of the typewriter and rotary phone. As you read this sentence, academic linguists are busy dissecting tweets, texts and posts. Their early findings? Social media writing is almost punctuation free, except for liberal use of exclamation marks. Imagine a future court trying to interpret legislative intent by counting exclamation points. And issuing a decision that says, simply, “WTF!!!!!!!”.

TRUMP RULE OF MENTAL HEALTH: IF HE LOOKS, ACTS & GOVERNS CRAZY, HE’S CRAZY

There is an intense and amusing battle raging in the psychiatric community over whether the president is nuts. Specifically the controversy is focused on whether it is ethical for a shrink to declare Donald Trump insane without having examined him. There is a growing plethora of practicing therapists who have publicly diagnosed The Donald as bonkers, albeit in more elegant and clinical prose. And they have all incurred the wrath of the American Psychiatric Association whose rules prohibit members from publicly diagnosing political figures unless they have examined them and obtained their permission to release the findings.

This is known as the “Goldwater Rule”, and it evolved from a controversial psychiatric survey taken during the 1964 presidential campaign between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson. A magazine polled more than 2,000 psychiatrists and a majority said the Republican senator from Arizona lacked the mental stability to be president. After losing the election, Goldwater sued the magazine for libel and won. Years later, the psychiatric association adopted the rule now being invoked, without much success, to keep its members from commenting on Trump’s mental state.

Dr. Allen Frances, a psychiatrist at Duke University School of Medicine and an author of the standard manual on psychiatric disorders, wrote a letter to the New York Times defending the president against the insanity label lobbed at him by some of the doctor’s colleagues. He said the commander in chief lacks the “distress and impairment required to diagnose a mental illness.” Trump might have tweeted the good doctor’s endorsement, if not for the sentence that followed: “Nevertheless,” Frances wrote, “he can and should be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.”

Thankfully, bloggers are not covered by the Goldwater Rule. That means I can go out on a limb and say publicly what most world leaders have to be thinking: President Donald J. Trump is batshit crazy.

Let’s count the ways:

• Turned the Nuclear Codes into a Facebook Moment. Since the start of the arms race, a military attaché, clutching a briefcase that can be used to launch nuclear missiles, has always been in close proximity to the commander in chief. All previous presidents have treated this sobering arrangement with well-deserved discretion. Not The Donald. He invited fellow diners at his Mar-a-Largo resort to pose with the “nuclear football” and its carrier for cute social media fodder.

• Thinks Frederick Douglas is Still Alive. Trump kicked off Black History Month with a lengthy monologue about how the “dishonest media” incorrectly reported that Martin Luther King’s bust had been removed from the Oval Office. Then, trying to think of other black people to mention, he gave a shout out to Douglas, saying the abolitionist who died 122 years ago “is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job.”

• Called for the Destruction of a Court that Ruled Against Him. Trump went to Nashville this week to deliver a carefully scripted speech in support of the Republican health insurance bill. Minutes before taking the stage, the president learned that his second attempt at an anti-immigration order had been blocked by a federal judge. So he jettisoned the insurance pitch and ranted about how he’d like to “break up” the Ninth Circuit.

• He Sees Some Holocausts as Better than Others. Asked what he learned in his first intelligence briefing, Trump said, a “nuclear holocaust would be like no other.”

• Declared Unconditional Love for Himself. In an interview with an ABC reporter, Trump said, “I don’t want to change . . . I can be the most presidential person ever, other than possibly the great Abe Lincoln, but I may not be able to do the job nearly as well if I do that.”

• Repeatedly Sticks his Foot in his Mouth. As his lawyers draft briefs supporting his second travel ban order on the basis that it substantially resolved legal objections in the original document, Trump grabs a microphone and says the new order is “just a watered down version” of the first one.

• Thinks he is the Least Racist Person Ever. Seconds after making that declaration during a news conference, Trump asked a black reporter if she could set up a meeting for him with the Congressional Black Caucus since they must be her friends.

• Comes out of his Own Little World Just Long Enough to Create International Incidents. The Obama-wiretapped-me fantasy now seems destined to have a longer life than the Iraq War. By now, Trump’s belief that the former president electronically surveilled him has been repudiated by every major Republican leader in Congress and the head of the FBI. But being The Donald means never having to say you’re sorry, or wrong. He doubled down this week and suggested that British spies planted the bugs for Obama. The Brits were enraged, but Trump wouldn’t back off, insisting he heard it on Fox News so it must be right. Fox News quickly said there was no truth to the story, but Trump kept right on mumbling about it, and even tried to drag a mystified German Chancellor Angela Merkel into the fracas late last week.

And on and on the list grows. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins noted yesterday, the insanity of the Trump administration can be measured by the fact that the new secretary of the interior rode to work on a horse named Tonto, and nobody paid much attention. Somewhere, in some afterlife, a bemused, and oh-so-very sane, Barry Goldwater is shaking his head and muttering, “And they called me crazy!”

PRESIDENT NARCISSUS: NOBODY LOVES TRUMP LIKE TRUMP LOVES TRUMP

Donald Trump has inhabited the White House for less than two months, but he is already the most psychoanalyzed president in history. A Google search of “Trump narcissism” turns up 449,000 entries. Here is a quick sampling: “Coping with Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the White House”, “Donald Trump, Narcissist-In-Chief”, “Trump is an Extreme Narcissist, and it Only Gets Worse From Here”. There are scholarly treatises portraying Trump as a posterchild for narcissism. There are letters from psychiatrists suggesting that the president undergo immediate treatment for the personality disorder. There is a ponderous analysis of whether narcissism could lead to impeachment.

Diagnosing a mental disorder is far beyond the reaches of this blog. Yet, there is a piece of this Narcissus stuff that is politically compelling, particularly as it relates to predicting the future of the Trump Administration. It is that aspect of the phenomenon that I want to explore here.

Although narcissism at its extreme is a recognized mental disorder, Sigmund Freud originally used the term to describe a personality type. He saw narcissists as emotionally isolated, very distrustful, poor listeners, lacking in empathy, dependent on adulation of others and likely to react to perceived threats with rage.

However, Freud also noted, according to a paper written in 2000 by the noted psychoanalyst and anthropologist Michael Maccoby, that “people of this type impress others as being ‘personalities.’ They are especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the role of leaders, and to give a fresh stimulus to cultural development or damage the established state of affairs.”

Over the past 20 years, experts like Maccoby, and Sacramento psychologist Mark Ettensohn, have taken a close look at how narcissists perform as leaders. Despite their self-involvement, Ettensohn notes that narcissistic leaders can be very tuned in to what people are thinking or feeling, more so than their non-narcissistic counterparts. “Because narcissists spend so much time trying to manage deeply felt insecurities and trying to read other people for whether or not they’re liked,” Ettensohn said, “they tend to get pretty good at knowing what’s going on inside of others.”

Trump, more than any other player on the national political stage, picked up on the intensity of the dissatisfaction and frustration of a large segment of left-behind working class voters. They became his rally crowds, forming a perfect symbiotic relationship between those who wanted to pound the system to smithereens and the crazy, larger-than-life narcissist who spoke loudly and carried a large sledgehammer. Daniel Bober, a clinical psychiatry professor at Yale University School of Medicine, said narcissistic leaders project far more self-confidence than they have and “people tend to follow them because of that confidence.” Think about it: How many times, before and after the election, did we read comments like this one, from a Wisconsin woman quoted by the Washington Post?: “. . . he’s got this crazy character, he’s very flamboyant and irrational. (We) supported him not because of his character, but because he represented substantial change.”

The professionals who study the dynamics of narcissistic leaders have identified two key causes of their downfall, both well worth keeping in mind as we watch Trump in the days ahead. One of them, identified by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a business psychology professor at London’s University College, is that the seductive charisma of inflated promises burns off when they aren’t fulfilled. Losing the adulation of the masses is as frightening to a narcissist as a crucifix is to a vampire.

That kind of rain has just started to fall on Trump’s parade. The Washington Post reported yesterday that many of his true believers are mortified over his backing of a health care bill that would take away their insurance. It’s a classic breakdown between a narcissist’s grandiose promise and the disappointment of his followers who believed in them. After all, it was just a month ago when his fans cheered the president’s words: “We’re going to have insurance for everybody. (You) can expect to have great health care. Much less expensive and much better.” Earlier this week, Trump threw his support behind the House Republican plan that will leave an estimated 24 million Americans without insurance, including many hard core Trump backers who would lose their Medicaid coverage.

Maccoby, the psychoanalyst and anthropologist who has written extensively about narcissistic leaders, says they can succeed for the long haul only if they have an effective lieutenant by their side, helping them avoid the most destructive behavior. In Trump’s case, that would include taking control of the Twitter account. Maccoby used the late Steve Jobs and Apple as an example. Jobs’ narcissistic style got him fired when he tried to run the company by himself. He later succeeded, Maccoby noted, when he came back and partnered with Tim Cook in operations and Jony Ive in design. Maccoby also said Napoleon fit the narcissistic mold and was functioning quite well until he discharged his close adviser, Talleyrand, leading to Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia since there was no one there to talk him out of it.

If Maccoby’s theory that narcissists can succeed only with the wise guidance of an able assistant, Trump is doomed. After all, Stephen Bannon, his chief strategist and bomb thrower, was writing racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic screeds for a far right wing website before he ended up in the west wing. Nobody else on the White House staff has yet shown any promise at being able to save Trump from Trump. If the psychological experts are right, the drama of the Trump presidency will grow even more dark and dreary in the days to come. As his fans grow disillusioned and withhold their love, the president will respond with more rage, furor and desperation. And there seems to be no adult in sight capable of holding him back. That means only one thing: the ending of this reality show is not likely to be pretty.

THE TRAGEDY OF TRUMP: WINNING AN ELECTION DOESN’T CREATE AN ABILITY TO SERVE

This country’s 45th presidency is unfolding like a Shakespearian tragedy. The protagonist, King Donald, is so consumed with proving the legitimacy of his throne that he unleashes one stunt after another, each more bizarre than the last, all designed to prove himself worthy of his title. The dramatic irony, of course, is that the more the king does to create the illusion of legitimacy, the less legitimate he appears.

This diabolical storyline developed its rich texture from the backstory of the prequel, last year’s general election. Remember the third and final presidential debate when The Donald, then behind in the polls, declared that he might not accept the election results? The rarely stunned New York Times called Trump’s position “a remarkable statement that seemed to cast doubt on American democracy.” In a classic plot twist, Trump won, but his self-sowed seeds of doubt over the vote tally invaded his own psyche, haunting him like a Dickensian ghost. Hilary Clinton conceded to Trump. The Electoral College certified his election. The chief justice of the Supreme Court administered his oath of office. Throughout all of those rituals, King Donald remained angry and on edge. He was holding an “illegitimate election” card that he never had to play. His unshakable dread was that it would now be played against himself.

Nearly two months into his presidency, Trump remains paralyzed over his fear of not being seen as legitimate, despite the absence of any serious and credible challenge to the election results. He spent the first 48 hours in the White House telling foolish lies about the size of his inaugural audience. Then, out of the blue and without a scintilla of evidence, he insisted that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for rampant election fraud. And then came the Russian stuff. Intelligence agencies said there was evidence that Russian spies interfered with the election in an effort to help Trump win. While the rest of the country saw that as a serious threat to our democracy, the new president imploded over the notion that he didn’t win the election on his own merit. Tragically, this president’s neurotic obsession about looking like a winner has made him the biggest loser in White House history.

The fact that Donald Trump’s presidency is lacking legitimacy has nothing to do with vote counts or Russian espionage. A legitimate president doesn’t:

• Accuse his predecessor of wiretapping him, without a shred of evidence.
• Preach “America First” and then allow the Keystone Pipeline to be built with foreign steel.
• Criticize Arnold Schwarzenegger’s television ratings at the National Prayer Breakfast.
• Place a hold on what he considers an urgent national security program (Travel Ban 2.0) in order to bask in the afterglow of the only speech he has given without looking completely unhinged.
• Call the news media the “enemy of the American people.”
• Boast about the magnitude of his Electoral College win in a phone conversation with the Australian prime minister.
• Call people names like “neurotic dope”, “clueless incompetent”, “dumb as a rock”, “sick loser”, “obnoxious”, “dumb mouthpiece”, and “total disaster”. (Recipients of presidential wrath, in order of appearance: the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, the National Review’s Rich Lowry, CNN’s Don Lemon, George W. Bush’s political strategist Karl Rove, Sen. John McCain’s daughter Meghan, Sen. Lindsey Graham and former defense secretary Robert Gates.)

Now, add to that abbreviated list of highly un-presidential behavior, two recent episodes:

The Washington Post ran a compelling and amusing piece earlier this week that cataloged Trump’s history of staging outrageous stunts in order to divert media attention from his various messes. The article’s point was that the president’s wiretap tweet bomb was a calculated move designed to deflect attention from the Russians’ election tampering investigation and the attorney general’s recusal. As it turned out, the ruse had the design and execution of a fifth grader forging a parent’s signature on a permission slip. It produced four days of media speculation over whether the FBI might have persuaded an international court to authorize wiretaps on Trump associates based on evidence of collusion with a foreign government. It was a Keystone Cops diversion that ended up with an even deeper plunge into the Russian scandal it was created to deflect.

And then there is Trumpcare, or the lack thereof. The president spent the campaign ranting about the evils of the Affordable Care Act and how he would replace it immediately with “something wonderful”. Four days before he was inaugurated, Trump said there would soon be “insurance for everybody,” at much lower costs. House Republicans, who repealed Obamacare 725,000 times when it didn’t count, were chomping at the bit to see the new president’s plan. Turns out he didn’t have one. A week ago, The Donald had this to say on the subject: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” The Republican Congress , abandoning all hope of presidential leadership on this issue, put out its own miserly health care plan, one that would leave millions without coverage. Trump immediately tweeted his support. Yet, as soon as the bill took shots from all directions, he told people not to worry because everything is negotiable. The next day he backtracked after House GOP leaders told him they had very little room to move. The president is now prepared to go back on the rally circuit to churn up populist demand for a bill he clearly doesn’t understand.

In every way that counts, Donald J. Trump has failed to conduct himself with the honor, integrity, decency, empathy and intellectual vigor that form the soul of the presidency and give it legitimacy. It’s not about the popular vote or the Russian hacks. It’s about the human qualities this man lacks.

TECH JOBS: SEXUAL HARASSMENT WITH BENEFITS

During the last decade of my career as a union rep, the biggest challenge was trying to hang on to basic benefits that had been won years ago. In the beleaguered newspaper industry, that battle was all uphill. We reduced sick leave and vacation time. We froze pensions and scaled back medical insurance. The pain was aggravated by almost daily reports from the booming tech startups that were offering a smorgasbord of benefits to die for (here and here): one year of paid leave for new mothers and fathers, on-site child (and dog) care, acupuncture and improv classes, free meals, midday siestas in a “nap pod,” $4,000 in “baby cash” for employees with newborns, and unlimited paid vacations.

As accomplished as I was at making outrageous arguments with a straight face, I would have had a hard time staying in character while pounding the table over nap pods. Besides, our entire focus was on trying to maintain some semblance of medical insurance and a modest retirement plan. Those shiny tech benefits formed a cruel oasis in our desert of retrogressions. Based on recent developments, however, all that glitters in Silicon Valley employee relations is not, by any stretch of the imagination, gold. As Paul Harvey used to say, here’s the rest of the story:

Despite its cutting edge image, the tech industry is a bastion of sexual harassment, a throwback to the pre-Clarence-Thomas days when male supervisors didn’t differentiate between the workplace and a pick-up bar, five minutes before last call. According to Fortune Magazine, 60 percent of the female tech workforce say they have experienced unwanted sexual advances on the job, most of them from a superior. Some 39 percent of those women said they did not report the harassment out of fear it would hurt their careers.

Susan Fowler was not among that 39 percent. She recently quit her engineering job with Uber because of what she described as a culture of rampant sexual harassment. She described her experiences in a blog post that has managed to shed a glaring light on what had been a dirty little secret of tech employment. Fowler said her manager repeatedly asked her to have an affair. She went to Uber’s Human Resources Department where, to her astonishment, she was told that it was the guy’s first offense and they were not inclined to take any action beyond a warning. Fowler said she later learned that her manager had made similar overtures to several other female subordinates, all of whom had also gone to HR and gotten the same “first offense” line. More women have since come forward with related accusations against other managers. In a quick clean-up effort at damage control, Uber brought in former attorney general Eric Holder to help with a corporate-wide sexual harassment investigation.

This kind of predator conduct was common in most workplaces 30 years ago. It went hand-in-hand with a male-dominated hierarchy and the subservient role carved out for women workers. Sexual harassment is a large umbrella. It includes unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, lewd and offensive gender-based comments and related harassing behavior based on sex. All of that was perfectly legal until the late 1970s when federal courts, for the first time, ruled that the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition against sex discrimination covers sexual harassment. That led to seven-figure damages against employers who failed to protect their employees from sexual harassment.

All of a sudden, companies were adopting strict no-harassment policies and training supervisors to keep their hands and ribald thoughts to themselves. A lot of whining men stumbled through the 1980s, blathering to each other about how “a poor guy just doesn’t know what he can do or say these days”. By the mid 1990’s most of them had figured it out. That’s not to say sexual harassment came to an abrupt halt. It never left us, but the law and threat of punitive damages changed the workplace culture and dramatically slowed it down.

And then the tech boom hit, and it was the 1970s all over again. These nerdy, otherworldly digital gurus who redefined the workplace to make it fit a whole new approach to functionality, came programed with a manly way of thinking that had been outlawed 40 years ago. Since Susan Fowler blew the whistle on Uber, scores of women from other tech companies have come forward with their horror stories. Haana told the Guardian that her Silicon Valley manager put his hand up her shirt and groped her while they walked down the street after an off-site meeting. Joe told a leading tech blog that he witnessed a top executive repeatedly hit on and touch female staffers Joe supervised. Joe went with the women to report the incidents to the CEO but nothing was done.

Here’s how Wired.com described the culture of tech workplaces: “Kegerators, or at least well-stocked beer fridges, are standard fixtures at tech companies, right up there with ping-pong tables and beanbag chairs. Some, like GitHub and Yelp, even offer multiple brews on tap. Conferences and meetups are awash with free drinks.”

Clearly, this industry has carved out an alternative universe for a work environment, replacing the conventional office’s structure and rigidity with a party-like atmosphere that intentionally blurs the line between work and fun. Unfortunately, that’s not the only line being discarded. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act does not contain a sex discrimination exemption for cool, innovative tech companies. A word of caution to women seeking employment there: nap pods, child care and oodles of paid time off are worthless without a guarantee of a workplace free of discrimination and harassment. Sadly, such a venue seems to be a rarity in the tech industry.