Both examples are toxic; malicious; whatever adjective you'd like to use.
If the alternative is to worry about devaluing the word, and thus letting less-toxic-by-whatever-definition-suits-me-best workplaces slide, because dontchaknow slaves work for pennies stitching jeans together in bangladesh; that's not acceptable. There's always a greater evil. If you ask me choose the lesser evil; I'd prefer not to choose. It's possible to hold them both accountable.
Moreover, this idea that tech jobs can't be toxic, they must be a lesser evil, because: you're paid so well! You get to work from home! You get free lunch at the office! Job security for life! That's bullshit. Its all, entirely, totally, rooted in society's child-like understanding of mental health. OSHA for mind jobs doesn't exist; it probably shouldn't, because we really don't understand what causes this, why different people react so differently, and what "healthy" looks like. But that doesn't mean the damage isn't real.
I am entirely and totally convinced that in a few decades: we'll look back on comments like your's the same way we look back on the companies who used radium to make measuring cups, or those who lined the walls of houses with asbestos. It'll be overwhelmingly obvious in hind-sight. That toxic workplace behavior can cause damage in people so significant that its net harm is higher than many of the more mundane things OSHA protects against. And maybe more critically to Big Business; that workplaces which operate like this are overwhelmingly low-performing on any timeframe longer than a few weeks.
I'll add that in this "information economy", we have few (if any) easy-to-learn-and-apply frameworks, analogous to notions of food groups, good vs bad fats, etc.
Thus, not only are we drowning in information (especially as knowledge workers), we're also extremely prone to navigating it in ways detrimental to our (mental) health.
If the alternative is to worry about devaluing the word, and thus letting less-toxic-by-whatever-definition-suits-me-best workplaces slide, because dontchaknow slaves work for pennies stitching jeans together in bangladesh; that's not acceptable. There's always a greater evil. If you ask me choose the lesser evil; I'd prefer not to choose. It's possible to hold them both accountable.
Moreover, this idea that tech jobs can't be toxic, they must be a lesser evil, because: you're paid so well! You get to work from home! You get free lunch at the office! Job security for life! That's bullshit. Its all, entirely, totally, rooted in society's child-like understanding of mental health. OSHA for mind jobs doesn't exist; it probably shouldn't, because we really don't understand what causes this, why different people react so differently, and what "healthy" looks like. But that doesn't mean the damage isn't real.
I am entirely and totally convinced that in a few decades: we'll look back on comments like your's the same way we look back on the companies who used radium to make measuring cups, or those who lined the walls of houses with asbestos. It'll be overwhelmingly obvious in hind-sight. That toxic workplace behavior can cause damage in people so significant that its net harm is higher than many of the more mundane things OSHA protects against. And maybe more critically to Big Business; that workplaces which operate like this are overwhelmingly low-performing on any timeframe longer than a few weeks.