I'm not giving the employees the benefit of the doubt. I'm just unwilling to castigate them without knowing more. And you just don't seem to be able to recognize that. Maybe it's not a case of you being silly about something; it's a personality difference, like Myers Briggs.
In court, sometimes a judge will instruct a witness that "yes, no, and I don't know" are all acceptable answers. That is to say, human logic is three valued, and you just see it as two-valued. So you interpret anything that is not critical of something as being in favor of it, which is why you characterized me as giving anyone the benefit of the doubt.
And this is what happens: you have a need to assign a judgment to whatever you read. You read this claim that employees are doing something, and you have to see it as bad or good. You don't really know anything about it, but bad seems more intuitive an option for you so you go with that. Then, when someone disagrees with you that it's bad, you automatically assume they think it's good. And that's just not how most people work, in my view. Hence the instructions in court: most people accept "I don't know" as a valid answer and indeed often the right answer.
I dismissed the story because of a long, deep experience with right-wing agitators lying and/or badly exaggerating about these topics. It's not instinct; it's definitely learned. It comes from watching falsehood and falsehood emanate from the right-wing culture warriors, for decades. It's all lies, all the time. They have earned that lack of trust a hundred times over.
By contrast, I instinctively took the position "I don't know" instead of judging the employees about whom I knew nothing.