What the &#@!? Watch your language at work

A new documentary that takes an affectionate and colorful look at the world’s most notorious four-letter expletive – the film’s title is that same F-word, which the media has decorously been referring to as “f---” – spends a fair amount of its running time examining the issue of free speech.

But there’s one topic that the film, which shares the opinions of a cross-section of media types, including Ice-T, Janeane Garofalo, Judith “Miss Manners” Martin and Pat Boone, doesn’t address.    

Here’s a clue.

What’s the other four letter word that may not provide a fertile ground for the F-word and others of its ilk?

W-O-R-K.

That’s right. Despite the U.S. constitutional right of free speech, not every workplace is inclined to tolerate language which, like the F-word, is generally considered blue, crude, raw, rude, cursing, profane or bawdy.

“A lot of people make that mistake and think they can talk any which way” at work, says Carl Jaskolski, an assistant profession of human resources in the M.B.A. program at Concordia University in Wisconsin. And just because people use certain undesirable words in an upbeat way – an example would be the popular use of the F-word as an adjective, such as when one describes an object as “f***ing awesome” – it doesn’t get them off the hook in a 9-to-5. “It may not be offensive in the context of how the speaker is saying it, but it’s about how I’m hearing it,” he says.

Jaskolski believes one reason for workplace potty mouths – he says the worst offenders are often found in management positions, the media and in communication and service industries – is that, over time, people simply have gotten used to using that type of speech. “Individuals have been conditioned to that language, meaning they’ve been living in households or worked in environments where that language was used.” He described one of his students, a police officer who, as part of a project, commented to fellow officers when they spoke crudely. The colleagues’ response, says Jaskolski, tended to be “I said that?” Not everyone is unaware, however.

Jaskolski describes a case involving two female workers in a factory setting in Wisconsin in 2001 who received a payout of $180,000 from their company, when they filed with the EEOC. The complaint? Another female co-worker used foul language – “attacking and offensive words,” he says – directed at the other two women, which affected the pair’s morale. The woman who did the cursing stayed on – the company described what happened at “shop talk.”

The most common situation is one in which an employee complains about someone else’s bad language in the workplace and then loses his or her job,” says Anne Golden, an employment attorney and partner in Outten and Golden in New York, a firm that represents employees or partners, not companies. The reason for termination is generally because the person using the bad language is the complainer’s superior. “Your employer has to stand behind the superior,” she says. “The boss is using the power the company gave him. And that means, if he is breaking any laws or other duty to the employees, the company is too. So, they have to take his side.”

Golden notes that, after the subordinate is fired, which she says frequently happens, the company may turn to the boss and chide him for causing the loss of a good employee and discipline that supervisor in other ways.

Sometimes, the person who has been fired does have a legal case against the supervisor, she says. For example, the boss might have used offensive language in a more legally delicate age, sexual, racial or religious context. “If the person can show it was for an unlawful reason they were being abused, they may have a claim,” Golden says.

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