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this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Rules around preventing a hostile work environment don't place an obligation on anyone to prevent it at all costs. It means that if an employee or - more relevantly here - a customer - is being hostile, then the workplace needs to make sure the employee or customer stops. But if you work in a call centre cold calling people, your company isn't going to get fined if you get an earful of abuse. (They might get fined for cold-calling depending on specifics :P) Same here.
A lot of call centres do not tolerate abusive behaviour directed towards their employees exactly for the reason of providing a safe work environment.
What does that mean in practice? The only way to "not tolerate" abusive behaviour in this context is reactive - blacklist the number, report the incident to the police if it was so bad it might constitute a breach of the law, etc. But the effect on the working environment has already happened, employees will still be calling new numbers, and will still receive abuse. Similarly, in the example above, HR could have a policy to report comments people come across, but the same situation occurs: the effect on the working environment already happened, and there will be more bigoted comments out there.
It's not the employer's job to shield their employees from every possible abuse they might encounter when interacting with the public through phones, the internet or indeed real life. They do have a duty (depending on jurisdiction) to take reasonable steps to protect them from abuse, but do you not see how while it's reasonable to remove a customer saying bigoted stuff to someone working in a shop, it's not reasonable to disable effective internet access in a job where you need access to third party libraries?
In practice it means that employees are allowed to end the call at will rather than "having" to continue to deal with them. That's the difference and it's as simple as that. No one is asking the employers to shield their employees from every possible harm.
Right so in practice employees shouldn't have to interact with people on github who are abusing them, but OP was making it sound like they had to do more than that, to me.