No, it doesn’t. First, there is no threat of physical violence and there is no way for the employer to know what the vote is anyway.
Punching someone in the face is not political speech. Making an economic prediction is.
I don’t know if that’s true, but even if it is, so what? We don’t regulate the content of political speech*, and for obvious reasons. Clearly there are times when an employer really does think he is going to have to let some people go if the “wrong guy” gets elected. Are we going to say that it’s OK to say there will be a 10% RIF but you can’t say there will be a 20% RIF?
What about the candidate who promises juicy tax cuts if elected or claims the other guy will significantly raise your taxes? It’s the same thing.
I’ve written before how the secret ballot used to be beaten during the era of machine politics, and it might be again, depending on the voting mechanism:
The machine’s emissary would stand outside the poll at a sufficient distance away so he couldn’t be seen by the poll workers. A voter would come up to him and the emissary would hand him a pre-marked ballot with all of the machine choices. The voter would go to the polls and pick up a blank ballot but deposit the pre-marked ballot. He would take the blank ballot back to the emissary as proof that he voted according to the machine’s intructions. The emissary would then mark the ballot and hand it to the next voter.
Right, but I don’t see it as merely an “economic prediction.” It’s an only-sort-of-veiled threat. “If my guy doesn’t win, I’ll fire you, so make sure you do what you have to so that doesn’t happen.” I agree with you that it doesn’t rise to a level of illegality, but it does strike me as clearly unethical.
Yup. And if an employer clearly implied he’d fire you if the guy not offering the juicy tax cuts gets elected, I’d also find that unethical.
It SHOULD be and probably is, IF you can prove it. But then you can tell them anything. How will they know who you voted for? Tell them you wrote in for Micky Mouse.
Kind of reminds me how Velero stations down in Texas had put up signs on all their pumps about how if some Democratic thing passed in congress relating to Oil or Gas or Cap-n-Trade, or whatever… that gas prices were going to go up.
Never bought gas at a Valero again, but it’s their right to do that kind of thing.
If an employer honestly believes that if politician X wins an election that their business will be hurt, then I say not only is it fine for them to echo this to their employees, but it is morally imperative for them to do so.
This is very, very different from an employer saying, “If you vote for X, I will fire you”, so stop suggesting that’s what the employers are doing.
They are saying, “If X wins, our company is going to suffer and layoffs might occur.” Not a threat, just an opinion.
Do you watch parks and recerations. I am watching it on Netflix now and there is an episode where {SPOILER ALERT} Amy Poehler is running for city council in a city where the single largest employer is a candy company owned by the father of Amy Poehler’s political opponent in the city council race.
The candy company says it will be forced to relocate out of the city if their preferred candidate loses. Thats not an economic prediction and neither is a lot of the stuff employers are saying.
How do you know it wouldn’t be an economic prediction, and who is in a position to decide that? “Economic prediction” doesn’t mean that you get 90% of the economists (or whatever) to agree with you. It can be an opinion. A political opinion about an economic event.
Sorry, that’s political speech. If you don’t like it, you are free to refute it in the public sphere. That’s how free speech works.
Because the show expressly says that it is not an economic prediction but a threat.
If you want to call it political speech, then fine but its not an economic prediction. I call it bullshit and about as based in reality as the in-person fraudulent voter that the voter ID laws are supposed to dissuade.