I’m pretty sure you and I are mostly in agreement. The problem arises when you look at the source material I was reacting to. For reference:

Harassment, discrimination, and retaliation are illegal under state and federal law. There are never any excuses for covering up, for supporting, or for ignoring unlawful behavior. If a company has properly trained all employees about harassment (see #4 above), there are never any reasons to give multiple “chances” to employees who harass, discriminate, or otherwise treat their coworkers unlawfully and/or inappropriately. If, after a careful investigation, the company has determined that the employee acted unlawfully or inappropriately, the outcome should be a swift termination.

and:

What companies can do: institute a zero-tolerance policy to protect both the company and its employees from unlawful and/or inappropriate behavior.

The suggested chain of events here is:

1. Employees receive training about harassment.
2. At some point in future, employee has cause to complain about harassment.
3. Company investigates claim, fires harassing party as first, last, and only step.
4. There is no step four.

Now, there’s a lot of problems with this, right?

First, policies such as these are kinda open-ended. You’ll notice in particular bits about “unwanted advances”…read literally and taken in concert with a zero-tolerance policy, that suggests that asking somebody out on a date either results in a date or–if people are following the letter of the rules–termination of employment. Because zero-tolerance, right? No second chances.

Second, the author makes this appeal to the company to do the investigation. That’s no significant improvement over the existing system; had the answer been “take this shit to court or a commission or labor board”, I could get behind it…but the suggested policy is not really any different from the status quo other than saying “zero-tolerance all the time”. And you can bet your hat that the people already in positions of power doing bad things are probably not going to be found to have transgressed, the victims terminated for unrelated cause shortly thereafter, and so forth.

Third, zero-tolerance policies as a rule hurt more than they help. They have failed with the war on drugs, they’ve failed in schools, they’ve failed in policing. One might even go so far as to observe that being able to dial retribution to match the transgression (instead of instant exile) has always been a feature, not a bug, of competent lawmaking.

Fourth, this works well when you have people that are “professional” (whatever that means) but lacks the flexibility (because zero-tolerance means no flexibility) to handle the weirdness of people. Consider example cases:

• Alice is an intern who really has a crush on her coworker Eve. Valentine’s Day comes and she leaves a box of chocolates on Eve’s desk with a note wishing her a good day and offering drinks after work.
• Don is a vice president of marketing who uses his position (and corner office) to impress secretaries and frequently abuses his position to get new attractive ones assigned. Working late hours, it is not unusual that his subordinates will request a transfer after about a month.
• Fred and Wilma are at a company all-hands meeting, and make jokes to each other about the companies new line of dongles. Their coworker Barney finds this inappropriate and complains, they admit to making the jokes when asked–though the jokes had been between each other.
• Colt is going through divorce proceedings with xyr spouse and is stressed out about work. Xe is overheard in the stairwell one day grumbling about how everything would be easier if cis-hets all died.
• Stewey is announcing a huge project milestone involving a successful and very tricky aerial drone maneuver. He makes the announcement while wearing a shirt his friend made for him, which is garishly tropical and covered in people wearing swimsuits, for good luck.

Now, what do you think the reasonable action is in each of these cases? If you didn’t answer “fire them immediately” to all of them, you cannot support a zero-tolerance policy as the author suggests.

~

Let me poke at your assertion here a bit:

If you want to date, do it elsewhere, with people who consent to being dated.

I’m not saying that it is okay to be hounded at work by people looking for a date or a spouse. That’s absurd–you’re both (all?) there to work. But do consider:

• Folks who are not attached to family units spend over half their waking hours at work.
• Folks (at least in tech) will often pad out their “free time” with company activities, conferences, and so forth.

At least in the US, we’ve lost a lot of progress in tech on the fair work weak and on socialization. It is not fair to single folks to say “hey if you do this thing that comes naturally to you re: social interaction, you will be immediately fired”. There is something deeply, deeply dehumanizing about assuming that everyone in a company is some sexless human resource that needs no romantic companionship.

Perhaps we should require that people be either ace or married and monogamous before allowing them to work for our companies, yes?

Or, maybe, we should just recognize that people are gonna people, and maybe we shouldn’t fire them the second they express anything other than an economic interest in a coworker.

Moonbase Otago OneRNG is similar, although always seems to be out of stock.