Scores of picketers, outside every church in America, every Sunday from now until election day. They wanna politicize their religion? Ok!
This is the best plan in the world. Literally nothing could possibly go wrong by executing it.
What a great TV movie it would have made! The brave truck driver who faced death rather than abandon the private property of the employer! Friend Bricker will need a box of hankies for that scene where he says goodbye to his family and urges them to support and console his heartbroken boss!
I’m seeing “Judge Judy” Pirro in a cameo role as the meth-addled truck plaza hooker…
That’s not the law he was using to protest his firing, though.
It’s pretty clear me me that you think the two judges other than Gorsuch (Murphy and McHale?) saw he had no duty to fucking die for the company, and so they wanted to vindicate that principle when they ruled. But they were’t supposed to decide if he had a duty to die for the company. They were supposed to decide if he was fired for refusing to operate unsafe equipment.
If that exact language were pointed in the other direction, so that, let’s pretend, he COULD HAVE been legally fired for refusing to operate, and the company said: “We’re firing you for refusal to operate when you drove away,” what would be you reaction then?
I’m pretty sure you’d indignantly point out he didn’t refuse to operate by driving away, and he had no duty to stay and die for the fucking company.
Isn’t that true?
Of course you are.
But again, and like SteveG1, you focus on the everything but the text of 49 USC § 31105. The problem is that the text of § 31105 is what the driver was claiming prevented him from being fired.
I feel like you’re saying, “Since firing him was a gross injustice, I want judges to bend their interpretation to help him. I don’t particularly care what the statute says: I want the judge to do the right thing.”
Well, would you do it? Advocate to the best of your ability, without hesitation, that his man should have sacrificed himself for his employer’s property? Widow his wife, orphan his children for people who don’t give a rat’s if he lives or dies?
Devil has plenty of lawyers. Doesn’t need you.
Absolutely not. But I would have advocated for the proposition that the company has a right to fire their employees for any reason at all, except reasons that the law forbids, and in this case the law doesn’t forbid it.
So as an advocate for TransAm, I’d be perfectly entitled to argue that they had every legal right to fire Alphonse Maddin. The law did not forbid it.
As an advocate for Maddin, of course, I’d argue differently.
As a judge, I’d apply the law as written, without favoring either TransAm or Maddin, but just apply the facts to the written law in as neutral a manner as I could achieve.
The law does not forbid his boss from pressuring him to risk his life for the company? You OK with that?
How? What would be the different legal argument you would use to defend Maddin that you think would have prevailed?
If you thought( assuming you knew the predilections of these particular judges )Maddin might be more likely to be exonerated if you used the argument his counsel actually did, would you suggest it even though it would violate your personal judicial philosophy?
It really does, of course. That’s the import of the use of the terms “serious injury” and “hazardous” and “safety” in the section of the U.S. Code previously quoted. If the law supported employers in pressuring employees to risk their lives, there would be no mention of these conditions in the Code.
I notice that Bricker has avoided responding to xenophon41’s response to him, even though Bricker has posted here after that response appeared:
Jesus Fuck. You may have disagreements with Bricker and/or Sunny Daze over certain things, but over this? They’re making a modest bet over the timing of a political event. That’s it.
Xeno makes my point better than I did. Shoulda just QFT and shut up. (You da bomb, Xeno!)
No, you very definitely should NOT shut up.
But I do look forward to Bricker, eventually, responding to the excellent points made by xenophon41. Clearly the trucker was fired because the company wanted him to guard the load (in the disabled trailer), and he did not do so. If the equipment needed to accomplish that assignment was defective in such a way as to provide a “reasonable apprehension of serious injury to the employee,” as was certainly the case with a broken heater in sub-zero weather conditions, then the firing of the employee for declining to operate that defective equipment was unlawful.
I don’t mind shutting up, if someone has to. Didn’t have much to say anyway.
Maybe we wouldn’t be certain if you were speaking or not? Schrödinger’s chat.
The bestest is a legal argument that says, “Here’s what the words of the stature are, and here is how they apply.”
They did not, nor did the parties.
And it IS an expansive reading, because in no normal conversation does sitting in the truck waiting constitute “operating,” in a stronger way than actually driving it does. And here’s the easiest way to demonstrate your flexibility with the word: suppose dispatch had ordered him to leave the truck and walk to safety. And he decided it was too dangerous and stayed, shivering, in the truck.
When the company fired him for “operating” his truck without authorization, would you agree that this was a fair description?
Who said anything about “stronger”? And why would it matter more than “pretty much the same”?
Because if you’re arguing that a word meansX, and I show stronger arguments that it means Y, that’s a good reason to abandon X.
Nope. Not unless “Y” is strictly prescribed in the statute. Which it is not.
And in what sense is performing any function on direct instruction from your employee not an “operation” in the strictest sense of job performance? The employer instructed the employee to “wait” with the trailer, without apparently specifying what safe harbor the employee should utilize to do so. Which left two choices of company equipment: the failed trailer, which was entirely unprotected from the elements, or the truck itself, with a malfunctioning heater. Both of these equipments being unsuitable and unsafe for “waiting for the repair crew” in the specific environment.
See what unions and socialism have done! Nowadays, employees don’t feel any duty towards their benefactors! Why, who knows but that the repair team might have reached him long before he actually froze! OK, maybe a toe or two…
But that’s employee of the month, right there!
(Gotta be a missing piece here, no way can an employer even suggest that an employee risk their lives in order to protect company property. Not even in the reign of Donald, of House Harkonnen, worst of his Name…)