In a blue collar work place welders are dumb, electricians are gay, jokes about wives and girlfriends are fair game and a suction cup didlo is a tool of endless comedic potential, not a HR disaster waiting to happen. And the overwhelming majority of the time nobody takes any of that seriously or gets offended by any of it. It's just how the culture is.

Dunno what kind of lousy shops you worked at but nobody ever did anything like that at the granite shop I worked at for 5 years, nobody did that kind of stuff in the landscaping crews I worked on.

And even though I felt my coworkers were somewhat OK, they would still make remarks (especially homophobic & racist ones) that would be at least grounds for disciplinary action in most white collar fields.

That (along with RSI and the pay) was one of the reasons I left the trade. I enjoyed the job, it is really satisfying to have that sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, but I was frankly tired of having to be around/associated with crappy people.

those guys smoke, sit in the sun all day, work with all kinds of toxic shit, can fall, and don't have huge career growth potential.

they have nothing to lose and the humor shows it

I realized later I was just not seeing the people who felt excluded by this type of humor.

We'd always play a game where you'd throw a golf ball at the shop floor, trying to bounce it into the nuts of your coworker. I'd never even think of playing something like that in an office.

You're missing the point. I'd rather not be shot or hit by my coworkers at all, anywhere.

They're both examples of inappropriate workplace behavior.

It seems like, if all restaurant workers put up with the culture, it might be because those who won't never joined in the first place.

It is not applicable here though.

I wouldn't cringe if I heard off-color jokes at an auto repair garage.

I think I'd call the police if I saw a bunch of dipshits sitting around a workstation, targeting random women from the other room with facial recognition software to share degrading posts about them being receptacles for their own sexual gratification.

Aside from TV sitcoms and online forum caricatures, I haven't a clue what that kind of sociopathy has to do with blue collar workers.

By no means is it everyone but the percentage that could be categorized as such per 100 persons is definitely higher.

If you want to see it taken to an extreme go spend some time with Alberta oil/mining/gas industry workers.

Source: several friends (mostly female, some male) who are nurses. Their environments sound deeply toxic, and super political.

I would daresay out of line for all business environments. Blue collar doesn't mean one must suffer boorishness.

But it isn't a masculinity problem, it is just plain dominance behavior. That can have different manifestations. Some use drastic expressions, some try to shield women from the barbaric hordes.

Professional distance has its place in business of course.

I always look at it as the customer has my money in his or her pocket. As I'm not, myself, ever going to risk getting that money by calling that guy's daughter ugly. I'm not even going to consider putting anyone in front of that guy if there's even the slightest chance that he or she might call that guy's daughter ugly.

A lot of business success and failure is just common sense stuff like this. That's probably at least a part of what gave rise to that blue/white division in the first place. The guys at the top simply don't want to lose money over something stupid.

No it's not free, because it bleeds. It bleeds into interactions where it's completely inappropriate. You want to be uncouth, do it at home in places where there is no possible connection to me or my business. You're at this business, then you're on your P's and Q's or you're out. Simple as that. Times are already hard enough without throwing nuggetheadedness on top of everything else that's losing businesses money and putting employee livelihoods at risk.

But the million dollar question is how much it bleeds and whether that is worse than the trade-offs you get from telling people not to joke around. (obviously it's a scale not a binary choice)

Listen, i won't argue about "too PC", but in my experience, if a workplace have a not PC culture and the target of discrimination start shooting back harder than the bully, it always end poorly for everyone.

I'm a decent person and I treat people with respect. The reality is this isn't the goal of PC, I have to be socially submissive to the trend of the month.

I'm not trying to apologize for ultra-masculine culture, but this epistemic argument about the presence or absence of emotions boils down to "their culture is not my culture" and just increases the divisions between those cultures and accelerates the culture war.

In the end - if what you actually cared about was people being uncomfortable you'd think through the economic, social and technical structures that make them feel uncomfortable. IMO, it has overwhelmingly to do with naive adoption of technology, with PC culture being a way for those who benefit from this adoption to cope with the negative results of that adoption.

Don’t tell me I’m wrong for being offended because it’s your “workplace culture”.

Which doesn’t alter your point at all.