As my OP shows, it’s not just about white supremacy and most of the recent firings have had nothing to do with white supremacy. And as I’ve pointed out, employers could probably easily defend themselves in court on white supremacy, since it can be argued that a white supremacist cannot really function in the modern workplace. Unless he worked from home or something and didn’t serve customers.
The speech is protected speech. However, the targeting of political opponents for economic ruin is something that can and should be curtailed. Not through jail time or prohibiting such actions, but by taking away the power of the mob.
Let’s step back for a moment and agree for the sake of argument that such laws would probably not protect white supremacists. Probably also wouldn’t protect anti-capitalists, since they shouldn’t be working in the private sector anyway.
What this would do(and probably does in states where it already is the law), is simply protect normal political advocacy, as well as prevent one stupid decision on social media from ruining your life.
I think these sound like a handful of occurrences. That doesn’t sound like a national problem.
This sounds much too subjective to have an easy-to-interpret law. Who decides what is “normal political advocacy”? Who decides what is “one stupid decision on social media”? And why shouldn’t someone be fired for the latter? Even if the law prevented him from being fired, I might stop going to the local burger stand if the guy at the counter said something really ugly about women in public (for example). I just wouldn’t want to deal with that guy. This law sounds like it could destroy businesses if they couldn’t get rid of an employee harming their business. It would certainly create a lot of business for lawyers.
And since you haven’t shown that any more than a tiny number of people are actually being fired for such things, this sounds like a way to create a whole heap of new problems while solving almost nothing.
So you feel that a guy can work at a store, and spend all his off time publicly complaining about how much that store sucks, and the owners suck, and anyone who shops there sucks, and then be immune from being fired from that store?
Are there a heap of problems where political advocacy is protected by law from employer retaliation?
No one has to define normal political advocacy. All an employer has to do is prove by a preponderance of evidence that they fired the employee for his off duty political statements because they called into question his ability to do his job properly. That’s not a hard thing to do.
In the case of this professor, is there any evidence that he discriminated against Republican students? And if he did, is that normally something that gets professors fired? If conservative complaints are any indication, discriminating against conservative students is widespread and considered acceptable behavior. So basically there’s nothing wrong with this guy as a professor. There was no reason to fire him. Other than that lynch mob.
These are still extreme outliers. You haven’t shown this is a common occurrence. Until then, the problems your proposal would solve would be massively outweighed by new problems it creates.
Again, that could fall under “the employee can’t be trusted to do his job given what he’s said.”
Although I’d note that a lot of workplace bitching actually is protected by law. You can complain loudly of being discriminated against if you are a minority and they can’t retaliate against you, unless of course you’re doing it at work constantly and disturbing everyone else.
But as a general principle, laws do protect workers who complain about their job. As a matter of fact, the Google employee who was fired might have a case against wrongful termination because he was retaliated against for complaining about a policy he thought was wrong.
The article also references California’s laws that do exactly what I want:
Most, if not all states have laws that require that businesses give employees time to vote. (Ntot that they all follow these laws.) Some states require employers to pay for that time, most do not. Most say “a reasonable time”, a few give specific amounts of time.
So, if an employee asks to make sure that the shift that they are working does not interfere with their ability to vote, then there is no problem.
Now, you ask about unauthorized time, meaning that they did no t request the time off, or let the employer know that they were going to take that time off. Yeah, a business is perfectly in their rights to fire someone for not showing up, or leaving in the middle of their shift, or leaving early, without informing management ahead of time, even if they did so for voting.
As to the rest, I don’t see any reason I should have to have a nazi working for me. If I don’t know that they are a nazi, because they keep to themselves, and only express their naziness on social media from the safety of their computer, then I don’t care. I would not try to find out what the political affiliations of my employees are.
If I am made aware of them, especially if I am made aware because the individual in question has made a public appearance wearing nazi regalia and protesting against the right of inferior races to exist, then I do not wish to provide them with employment anymore. My clients would probably not want them working on their dogs, and my other employees would probably not appreciate having to work with someone who feels that way.
Okay, so you shouldn’t have to have a Nazi working for you. Trouble is, if political participation isn’t a protected activity, you can also decide you don’t want Green party members working for you either.
There’s a lot of arguments I can acknowledge, but one I cannot coming from anyone but hardcore libertarians is a sudden concern for employer rights. Protections for political activity are not the only concern out there. In the age of social media, there have been concerns about employers checking applicants social media. There have also been concerns about employers using credit checks to screen employees, and of course I’ve cited the Obama administration’s concern about businesses refusing to hire ex-felons. So unless you’re one of those who believes these are unnecessary, burdensome regulations or potential regulations on employers, I don’t think it’s very honest to resort to libertarianish arguments about employer rights in this thread. I buy it from Will Farnaby and HurricaneDitka. And that’s about it.
Okay, I’m fairly sure that no time off to vote laws let you “skip a shift.” Here’s a summary of California’s, for example: "Time off to Vote" Notices :: California Secretary of State. I would imagine it’s one of the more worker-friendly state laws in the US, but it allows employers lots of hoops to make workers jump through. (A reasonable number, I’d say, but maybe I’m wrong.)
And, more generally: “suck it up, buttercup – if I can do it, you can too” is almost always an awful way to approach discussions of public policy (and other social interactions). Not just because of the lack of empathy; the assumptions that underlie this attitude are often factually incorrect, based as they are on an individual’s narrow view of the world. (See the “but everyone has state ID! How do they drive/buy alcohol/use a credit card?” arguments about voter ID.)
That is correct, and if I don’t want some dirty hippie jill stein voter on my payroll, then I don’t have to have them working for me.
I own a small business, and I employ people. Why do you think that I would not have an opinion on who I should employ?
I do follow a bit of a balance, as I do believe that my employees have “rights” that are not actually legally mandated, but I also do realize that I have rights as well, as an employer, and those are important, not just to me, but to other employers and the economy in general. It is not a perfect balance, and that balance does change as circumstances change, but the idea that we should just completely dismiss the rights of employers because we do care about the rights of employees is a very incorrect conclusion on your part.
I would appreciate if you would not call me dishonest because of the side of the debate I am taking, and your lack of understanding of it.
The concerns that I have seen about employers checking social media was that employers would require applicants to give them their facebook passwords, or at the very least, would require them to “friend” the employer, so that the employer could see all that they shared with their friends. That’s a bit invasive, IMHO, but just googling someone’s name and seeing what pops up, not so much.
Credit checks, I absolutely agree employers should not be checking as part of the hiring process, and I don’t know why you thought that would be relevant.
As far as the ex-felons goes, I would have no problem hiring them, and I would have no problem taking the box off my application. My lawyer, however insisted that it stay for liability reasons. (He actually recommended I change it to “Have you ever been charged with a crime?”, which I refused) If I know that I hired a felon, and then they do something felonious, I can be liable for creating the situation. If I take the box off, then I am liable if I hire a felon without knowing about it, and they do something felonious. Only by making the box illegal, and forcing me to not know, do I escape from liability, so, while I have the box, I am against the box.
It may turn out that employer/employee relations is simply a more complex and nuanced subject, and if you take the simplest explanation you can think of, you are most certainly going to be wrong.
So, you’re going to fight to the death to protect your right to fire employees for not believing as you do, but you’ll happily submit to not being allowed to fire employees for certain legitimage business reasons.
While I barely agree with political participation as a protected activity, you seem to want ALL speech by an employee protected from being used as a reason for firing someone. I feel this takes away a basic right of a business owner to fire people he/she wants (aside from the protections already in place).
Are employers’ rights being unduly infringed in California? Are employers clamoring to have the right to fire people for political activity? I notice most of the states that protect such activity are blue states. Ever wonder why that might be?
Because historically, most of this kind of persecution was against liberal causes. Businesses probably didn’t even want to fire people for advocating for liberal causes, but often felt compelled to because of the shitstorm it could stir up. So they probably went to their state legislatures and said, “Tie our hands, please!”
I’m also not sure that a business owner actually has the right to fire anyone they want. Where in the Constitution is this? Even the public doesn’t have the right to fire employees for any reason. firing public employees is pretty damn hard, actually.
Plus, government’s power to regulate economic activity has been established as pretty much unlimited. The government doesn’t even need a good reason, if it’s economic activity they can restrict a business owner in any fashion a legislature or Congress sees fit.
So again, the talk of employer rights isn’t exactly valid. Protecting citizens’ right to political advocacy without retaliation solely for their views and not for their job performance is an entirely legitimate limitation on employer rights, as legitimate as restrictions on employers firing employees as retaliation for other types of protected speech(such as union organizing).
Now personally I do think that we should have economic rights, and that the current legal culture that says we have none that government doesn’t graciously allow us is the end result of liberal desires to be able to enact any economic regulation they want. They’ve appointed a lot of justices to make sure this is so, because it was not so prior to the New Deal. But that is the legal climate we live in: employers have no constitutional right to hire and fire as they please. The government can regulate hiring and firing practices any way the government sees fit. And I think this is fit.
You’ll notice that nobody was making these first amendment right arguments until the Nazis started marching. If you were fired for something like belonging to the Green Party or trying to organize a union, apparently that was okay. But suggest that somebody might lose their job for being a right wing extremist and suddenly the first amendment means something.
So, yes, we’re a little suspicious. Based on experience, we know that if a law was passed that protected employees, people would still get fired for criticizing Trump or belonging to the Green Party or asking for a union or making fun of their boss on Facebook. The law would be enforced with the usual double standard that it only protected people that the right agreed with.
Or it could be that the left likes this tool and really, really, really wants to be able to use it now that the tables have turned. Time for payback.
But the worm can turn again. And even now I think more lefties are getting fired than righties. And if that’s not the case it’s probably because so many blue states protect this kind of speech. I imagine it won’t be too hard to get red states to follow suit. I suspect that if it became a major political issue that workers would kinda like to be able to say what they want about politics without fearing retaliation.
