I hope you’re happy America! Now that you’ve discouraged the job creators, there will be fewer jobs for everyone. Fewer jobs means fewer wages and that means the whole country is less wealthy. How unpatriotic is that?
I haven’t been following closely enough to know if this is sarcasm. Anyone?
And during the Bush years, they were creating jobs over-fucking-seas.
I have a case citation in my notes, Elrod v. Burns, citing Perry v. Sindermann, that prohibits patronage dismissals of a public employee.
Coercive tactics are not mentioned, but we all know a claim for wrongful discharge from employment in a civil court is a lesser standard then burden of proof in a criminal court.
Elrod only mentions one case of a private employer and a discharge reprisal due to the fact the employee was a Communist party member.
IMO any employer who would communicate to thier employee’s “if so and so is elected, there will be mass layoff’s” is dirty, they only want one thing, thier man to win and is favorable to them due to business investments, stock market reaps etc.
I wrote “Should there be a law against employers threatening employees on how to vote?” What I should have put was “Should there be a law against employers threatening employees on how to vote and then actually doing it?”
If only he had really threatened them, instead of merely… What, cajole them? Warn them ever so nicely? Then maybe he would have been afoul of the law.
The next employer who wants to make a point with his employees only need to show them the article above. So you’re not Constitutionally protected from kinda, sorta telling employees who they should vote for and then firing a bunch of them when the election doesn’t go that way… Because they are Hispanic and Hispanics mostly voted for the other guy.
But it’s good to know that a business owner’s rights aren’t infringed at all. Comforting.
Actually what this demonstrates is there’s no law against reducing your workforce after your favored candidate loses the election.
And how do we know this? Because he fired them even though he has no idea how they voted.
He’s made a determination that given the policies Obama supports, his business is going to incur more costs and he cannot afford to have as many employees. That’s a perfectly rational evaluation to make (it may or may not be accurate, but it’s the kind of decision a business owner needs to make).
Explain how he stayed in business with the number of employees he had while Obama was in office. How did being re-elected change anything?
Obamacare has not been fully implemented, and he was holding out to see if it would be repealed. He also fears additional regulations.
Now, he may be crazy as a loon about those things, but that’s his prerogative. There is no law against not making good business decisions about your privately owned business.
Plus, I think his story is total BS. He’s not laying off that many employees. He’s trying to make a headline.
Well according to the article he’s building up a “nest egg” since Obamacare is going to cost him a fortune, blah, blah, blah.
I do not mean to suggest I think he’s made an accurate assessment, but it’s 100% within his rights to make that assessment and act on it. And it is in no way an infringement of his employee’s voting rights.
Guy was probably planning this for a month. It has fuck-all to do with who won. It just gets him in a news story.
If he feels he do without 22 employees and not see his personal returns fall, then that is what he is going to do.
The good news is that with the safety net probably still in place, those unfairly terminated will be able to get benefits… For a while, anyway.
If I wanted to make my voters think about voting my way, I’d just forward them this story and let them draw their own conclusion. Perfectly legal.
Yes, it is perfectly legal. You seem to be arguing more or less that nasty behavior ought to be illegal. Nope.
IMHO, these CEO’s who are deliberately trying to connect the dots for their employees between Obama’s reelection and mass firings are setting things up to backfire on them.
Are the ex-employees really going to believe that their devoted, caring former employers have their workers’ well-being at heart and are only falling back on firings and layoffs as a very last resort in order to keep from totally foundering under the impact of a tragically and devastatingly misguided policy? Or might they suspect that the employers are throwing a vindictive tantrum in the face of the possibility of reduced profits, and taking it out on their employees?
I think it would be a lot smarter for employers not to be so transparently partisan and so obviously vindictive in mixing their politics with their business. If Robert Murray’s 156 newly redundant employees weren’t mostly Democrats already, I bet they are now. (As someone claiming to be one of them was reported in Mother Jones, “I’ve seen how corrupt the company can be over the years and am fairly certain the layoffs are just a way to make the President look bad.”)
No, I am arguing that the threshold of what is and isn’t a legitimate “threat” as was discussed before should be a lot lower or it’s pretty fucking useless.
I would like to think you are right but that doesn’t help 156 people now and may not help the folks who deal with threats (or “threats”) in 2014 or 2016.
Maybe… But the fact is that all of them (and any other employees who work for people with similar views) now have to be on pins and needles because their job performance means little to keeping their jobs as much as how they profess to vote.
Why stop there? Since you have a taste for restraining others, why not make it illegal to report the story? Why not ban forwarding the story altogether? After all, such notices might persuade from voting against the way the better angels of their nature would have them vote.
Why not just make it illegal to do things that you personally would not choose to do? Why not just say, before anyone does anything ever, you must first get permission from John_Stamos’_Left_Ear? He will evaluate whether what you propose to say or how you intend to vote is salutary or inimical to the project of cultivating the Homo Progressivus, and give you good directions.
I mean, how could this project fail?
You seem to be confusing an employer threat of retaliation against the private behavior of employees with a “threat” of retaliation against the private behavior of the country as a whole.
If every one of Robert Murray’s employees in every one of Murray Energy’s subsidiaries had dutifully trooped off to the polls and voted for Mitt Romney, Obama would still have won the election and Murray would still have thrown his layoff tantrum.
Conversely, if Romney had won the national election, Murray would have had no incentive and no excuse to throw his little layoff tantrum even if every one of his employees had voted for Obama. There’s just no way that a vindictive gesture based on the entire outcome of a national election could credibly be interpreted as a retaliation against specific employees.
Now, if it should turn out that Murray selected which employees he would lay off based on knowledge of their individual political views and a desire to punish them individually, then I’m right behind you in opposing that. But a general hissy-fit on the order of “If I don’t get the outcome I want then I will do all I can to make other people unhappy too”, while it may be despicable and childish and unprofessional, does not really count as a threat of illegitimate retaliation.
This sums up the corporate worldview in a nutshell. And it makes my blood boil.
I wonder if the term “appearance of impropriety” has any relevance here? Isn’t there an appearance of impropriety when an employer indirectly threatens employees with layoffs and firings for voting the “wrong” way? I’d say so. There are many cases where an appearance of impropriety in a relationship of unequal power (student/teacher, etc.) can lead to legal consequences. Does anybody argue that the boss/employee relationship is not such a relationship, and that bosses should avoid the appearance of impropriety wrt their employees’ voting rights?
I guess you might say “If you’re not providing the capital or the patronage or the labor needed for the company to run, but just observing it from afar, then offenses to your ‘sense of propriety’ don’t matter very much.”
Let’s not kid ourselves, your argument is “I don’t have any skin in the game, but these people should take my feelings very seriously anyway.”
Whose sense of propriety should matter? Well, investors, customers, and current and potential employees. They should look at Murray Energy and say, “Wow, the management of the company seems to be pretty erratic and is given to making rash business decisions on the basis of irrelevant considerations. I don’t think I want to rely on them for investment returns/as my supplier/as my employer.”
Look, if Murray Energy employed these people, it was because the costs of employing them was less than the revenues they were making by employing them. (I.e., because it was profitable.) So, their firing means less profits for Murray Energy. And it means that these profit-generating miners can go to other companies and say, “Hey, you want to make a little more scratch? Put me to work.”
Now, it may be that the election is just a pretext, and Murray Energy was on hard times already. In that case, those miners were going to be laid off anyway. But if this really was a temper tantrum and there’s still money to be made in mining, then it’s Murray Energy that is now worse off in all but the short-term, not the employees.
This is why we laugh at the would-be John Galts. Fine, go fuck off to Galt’s Gulch, there’s a ton of people right behind you who want to make money and who will pick up the slack left by your departure. We will be fine. Be sure to send us a postcard from Galt’s Gulch though, we’d love to hear how that’s going.
Once again, though, the retaliation Murray was threatening his employees with had effectively nothing to do with how THEY voted.
What it depended on was how the WHOLE COUNTRY voted.
I agree that by saying “If Obama wins it will be terrible and I’ll have to fire people!”, Murray definitely sent his workers the message that he strongly believed that Obama’s reelection would be a very bad thing that they should strive to avoid. But I don’t think it’s possible to pin on him any threat of retaliation directly linked to THEIR acts.
As I said before, if Romney had won, Murray would not have been firing anybody even if every employee and their dog had voted for Obama. That right there, AFAICT (and of course IANAL), lets him off the hook for even “appearing” to threaten retaliation against their actual exercise of their voting rights.
Or maybe he would, simply because this late-autumn layoff event seems to be more or less an annual thing in the coal industry, boosted in this case by recent decreases in natural gas prices:
In short, we may be talking here about something that’s merely a normal part of the business cycle in the coal industry, combined with a vindictive tantrum on the part of a guy who just lost a boatload of money in political donations, and spun in order to cast the blame on Obama.
But not specifically an act of retaliation against employees for how they voted. (Although it looks as though the employees or ex-employees do fear retaliation if they criticize the boss.)