How can I professionally change circumstances so I no longer work with a convicted rapist?
I made a very significant edit to this question as it was quickly bound to be deleted, given it's content.
However there are a few answers there and some meta conversation under the question now so I'm opening this to try to be a good place to try to figure out what to do with the question.
I do not believe that the question should be deleted. This is a subject that could well come up in the workplace and deserves some balanced discussion without the shackles of judgemental deletion.
People commit crimes, they serve their time, and they go through the process of rehabilitation into normal society. They get jobs, and amazingly they're not all on building sites or road crews. Some of them enter the same workplace as you or I.
Yes, sexual and abuse-related crimes are despicable, but I don't think that burying these kinds of questions is appropriate.
I agree that this subject can attract heightened emotions and subsequent negative comments, but we can edit these out to provide a rational discussion of the issues at play.
I think that, after your edit, the question is not so controversial anymore and is even more answerable now.
However, there seems to be some underlying discrimination from part of the OP that seems to bias the opinions/answers given there. This is the problem IMHO, as the OP's problem is with the person and his past conviction, that seems not strongly related to the professional setting, and is more a "I don't like my coworker, what can I do" question therefore.
However, I see no future problems that could arise from the post now it has been improved with edits (perhaps just a few more iterations of an open-close war but eventually will stop).
Delete the question.
We do not want to deal with controversial subjects here that might offend people so since this is offensive to some lets just delete the question and move on. The question is unlikely to be helpful to anyone in the future and the OP is more than likely incredibly turned off by their SE experience anyway.
So on the off chance this is a real person with a real problem delete it. If it is someone trying to get to HNQ(My belief) then the deletion serves this SE best anyway.
Having read the revision history of the question, I'm starting to think that the edits went too far. While the OP obviously has strong feelings on the subject, holds incorrect beliefs and is thinking along completely the wrong lines for the solution, I don't see how that means they can't ask their question or that their question is not answerable. I've seen plenty of questions where the right answer is "your premises is wrong, here's what your real problem is and here's how you could go about solving it". I've provided answers for such questions in the past. I would propose to revert some of the edits in favour of new ones that make it clear what the poster's belief is (I get the distinct impression that he believes the coworker has no right to be working there, or even at all), perhaps taking some of the emotion out of the language, and then to answer the question as such.
I believe that the OP is not alone in their belief that being a convicted felon is grounds for dismissal and as such, I advocate keeping this question and providing an answer that makes it clear (in neutral language) that convicted felons do have the right to employment and that instead, the only correct solution is for the OP to either deal with their feelings or to changejobs.
I think Richard U's answer is headed in the right direction but is currently responding to the strong language in the original OP with a direct approach where I think a more neutral 'by the facts' approach is more appropriate (currently it comes across as almost ad-hominem).
To clarify, I propose to edit the question into a less hostile/emotional "I found out that I'm working with a convicted felon, am I correct in believing that he shouldn't have been employed by my employer" to which the answer would be "No, you are not correct, if you are unable to maintain a professional attitude with the colleague your only options are to request some sort of transfer or to start looking for a new job".
The meta discussion was triggered by my controversial custom close reason, and it appears that my point has been misunderstood, so let me clarify. This is the custom close reason:
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because the question has been substantially edited to invalidate several existing answers, and so it should be deleted altogether.
I like enderland's edit, and if that was the original question to start with, I would have no problems with it. However, the edit removes a key ingredient of the original question. The OP was clearly looking for ways to get the coworker fired for a crime that happened at least 20 years ago, and for which he has already served the punishment laid down by his country's laws.
This is a clear example of an XY problem. While providing the OP ideas on how to avoid working with this coworker can certainly appear to resolve the current problem, it doesn't strike at the root of the problem, which is the OP's belief that the coworker should be given additional punishment over and above that given by the law.
Most of the answers seem to provide him options to avoid working with the "tainted" coworker, thus implicitly acknowledging that it is reasonable and appropriate to shun an ex-criminal in this manner. Only Richard's answer seems to strike at the root of the issue, and his answer doesn't sound particularly rude, although it may be blunt.
While the edit reduces the opinionbait, and is much more generic and answerable, it is not what the OP was looking for, and brushing his actual issue under the rug to make the question less controversial doesn't help him either.
As a result of the edit, the existing answer(s?) which addressed the actual issue suddenly sound needlessly critical of the OP and some parts of it, such as calling out the OP on his plan to get the coworker fired, make no sense. It is certainly an option for the answer to be edited to match the new question, but making edits which require substantial edits to existing answers is explicitly discouraged. Moreover, if we allowed that, then everyone who posts an answer will have to keep monitoring edits to every question that they may have answered ages ago to check if their answer needs to be edited.
However, I wouldn't want a good edit to be reverted to a put the question back into its original controversial state, so I thought it best to recommend that the question be deleted altogether.
I do not feel particularly strongly about this issue, so if the community decides to keep the question and demand that the existing answers be edited to match the edited question, then I won't argue against it.
Please delete the question.
We don't want to talk about rapists and terrorists. They're evil people and thus inappropriate to the site.
