Tv reporter's blog gets her fired. Right or Wrong?

In My Humble Opinion
221

Again, principle. If I were a white business owner in 1950 and racists were complain that I serve blacks too, my response would be the same. I would keep doing it even if all the whites leave and I lose money, because I believe in the principle of employee privacy. I’ve acknowledged that it may hurt me, no need to keep beating that dead horse. The point is that it shouldn’t matter, employee privacy is important to me and morally right, in my view

My belief, one that I would stand on principle and lose money for, is that as long as an employee performs his job duty to my standards, then his personal life is no reason to discipline him. As a customer, I would of course not support a business that hires, let’s say, murderers, because again, that’s my values. I don’t think you two understand that this goes both ways, and the employee you want to fire today is one you may want to defend tomorrow.

What if Rupert Murdoch decides to fire all liberals, Democrats, or people from his networks that are left-leaning? What if MSNBC did the same for right-leaning people? What if all presidential elections come with a 100% house-cleaning of the opposition party. No Republicans work in the Justice Department, none at the IRS, none at the DMV, and this happens every time a new administration of the opposite party is elected. Would you like that?

And don’t give me the crap about “Political expression is a protected class”. Bullshit, that may be a protected class, but you’re hiding behind the law. What if, as a customer, I don’t like it that you’re hiring Republicans? Should the employer fire all of his Republicans? You know, at a certain point, you just have to say that the employee’s private life, as long as he can do his job, is none of the employer’s business. Where do you draw the line? Simply at protected classes? Gays aren’t a protected class in some states and I don’t think sexual orientation is a protected class federally, how about all those red states fire their gay or gay sympathizing employees? All people can do is snark about how bad my fictional business is but they don’t consider how much power an employer is given when he’s allowed to fire someone just because someone doesn’t like who he’s hiring. As long as the job is done right, it should not matter and the laws should protect employees in that respect

Sorry, missed it the first time

That’s fraud, false advertising, and damaging employer-owned products. Its right to discipline.

Saying you’re afraid of old people and that you refuse to do stories on them is more in the grey area. Does she ask for and get reassigned whenever there’s a story about old people? If the reassignment is approved, then who cares about her motivation? And if she picks what stories she wants to do and omits old people stories, that might be a discipline-worthy issue. But we didn’t get any details about exactly how she refused to do stories on them

Its a little tricky, there’s some layers to this so let’s explore it. It seems that her claim about old people is what’s really affecting the news. However, this isn’t a bar, there’s no set amount of “old people news” a station is mandated to run. If nobody notices she’s not doing old people news, then maybe the station just doesn’t run it enough for it to matter. It would be one thing if she was the station manager and claimed she refuses all news by old people, I can see the station’s product suffering because of that. But one reporter in an organization of many does not, to me, rise to a huge deal. If she was afraid of dogs and didn’t do any dog stories and dog owners boycotted the station, I would also defend her. Unless she is violating a “all reporters must do stories on old people” rule, then her motivation for refusing the stories is irrelevant ASSUMING the station manager cleared her not to do those stories after her refusal

I don’t either, but that’s because, like I said above, she damaged a product of the employer, subjected him to fines, falsely advertised a product as 100% when in fact it was watered down, and, like I’ve mentioned before, did this while acting as an agent of the business. There’s no way to water down the drink in private, she’s not taking bottles home and bringing them in the next day. Therefore, its impossible for her to water down drinks in private. In this case, yes, I agree with you, the method of discovery is meaningless

However, here’s what I would consider a difference. Suppose she tweeted about wanting to water the alcohol down but doesn’t and her employer fires her thinking they would lose trust with customers and face harsher scrutiny. In that scenario, I would not be in favor of disciplining the bartender.

My question would be: did anyone think she was doing a shitty job before, or after she mentioned it? If they only noticed afterwards, its confirmation bias. If nobody noticed she never does any old people stories before (and really, who would?) then it hasn’t affected her job at all, simply the perception of it. And in this case, that’s not enough to discipline her.

222

I’m lost on what this has to do with employee privacy. You are the owner, you are making the decision to serve blacks.

What if you were the owner and you wanted to continue to serve blacks and your employees refused?

If her employer asked her to do a report on old people, and she refused, she is being insubordinate

It has been reported that this is not the first time she was disciplined. She doesn’t seem like a star employee.

Tampering with mail is a federal offense, and she claimed to do that. How would you like it if you looked out your window and saw a police officer going through your mail, or checking what packages you get delivered? She wasn’t claiming that she goes through people’s mail on her own time, she does it while she is doing her job.

223

I know you are not addressing me here, Yog, but I’d like to expand on your comment. I have noticed a certain meanness and snarkiness too, in the responses. Some of the posters are very skillfully dancing on the edge of statements that could be reported to a mod. It’s a puzzler to me why they are so mean-spirited in their comments, as I am not very emotionally invested in this topic, it seems like an interesting subject, what are or should be the limits of employers’ control over an employees’ freedom of speech, but nothing to get all emotional about.

Then I remembered something I’d read a while ago, that people with power never like to discuss the limits/nature of their power relationship. They would rather simply exercise it, and do so in an unquestioned manner. And I noticed that there are a lot of people here who have hiring and firing power and hence may feel that imposing limits on their ability to control employees’ freedom of speech is an attack on their power.

It’s probably not a conscious, rational thing, mind you, just a subconscious thing that fuels all the unwarranted anger, pearl-clutching and so forth that is cluttering up the discussion.

224

A. No, I’m not, I ALREADY said she could be fired for saying “Fuck” on air more than once, and
B. You need to demonstrate why an employer should be able to CENSOR and employee’s free speech on their own time is necessary to a free and open society. Seems to me it’s just the opposite.

What limits have I proposed on limiting employers’ speech on their own time?

225

I wonder. Say there are two bakeries in a small village, and Jane works for Bakery A.

What if every single day Jane finished work, clocked off, and then went outside and stood on the main street handing out leaflets she printed that said Bakery A made horrible food.

Its her own time and her own opinion, but does Bakery A really have a moral obligation to keep Jane in their employ? Really?

Because that would be just stupid on their part.

226

Actually did a little investigating at work today, just to satisfy my curiosity. Turns out she self-reported. Seems stupid to do that, but as it turns out, she would have been caught anyway. Her job required use of a car, so she signed an agreement upon being hired that gave my company the authorization to check her driving record up to two times per year. They don’t always check twice, it’s more of a random thing.

227

Well, they’re all on the Dope so one can be forgiven for not noticing them.

228

For like the gazillionth time, no one has censored/limited her free speech. She can speak all she wants, she can blog until her fingers bleed. But what she can’t be, is consequence-free. Every entity, from this message board to her former employer the TV station has the ability (not right, because only people should have rights) to decide where the line is for acceptable behavior, as long as that line does not discriminate in certain ways. On this message board, I have the right to say “fuck you (insert poster’s name)” but the SDMB community rules say that if I do that I will be warned, or maybe just plain old banned. I have the right to say it, but there are consequences I should be willing to accept.

Can we ban the term free speech form the rest of this conversation? Please.

229

Good point. It’s still probably something I wouldn’t do.

230

Sorry, I didn’t say this clearly but I was hoping people would get the point I was trying to make. Suppose I was a white business owner in 1950 in an area predominantly white. Let’s say I hire a black person and that upset my mostly white clientele. To me, I would say “fuck off” to those people who refuse to patronize my business because of what a worker is doing or what a worker is (I realize that I’m leaving myself open to people who want to nitpick between behavior and birth, but hopefully people will realize that ultimately, its similar enough to be an apt comparison).

That would be wrong because they are doing it at work as an employee. Fired.

We don’t know if that happened. I would support disciplining her if that is how it went down. However, her phrasing seems to indicate that she picks what stories she does and it gets approved. If she never picks old people stories, I’m fine with that

I didn’t read about the nature of those disciplinary actions but what she got fired for is personal stuff. Whatever she did before seems to still allowed her to keep her job. This side issue with the personal blog should have no effect on her evaluation prior to that

If true, then fire her. But to me, people seem to use that as a backup argument when they are not convincing enough on their main argument that an employer should be able to fire her for her personal stuff. By all means, open an investigation to see whether or not she did tamper with mail, but I’m guessing a halfway decent lawyer could get reasonable doubt because she said “(maybe)”. Due to that, I think she was mostly kidding and thus am not in favor of firing her

That’s pretty deep, I have no way of knowing if its true though, but I have also noticed the unusually one-sidedness of the anger/annoyance in this topic. Seems like it should be more, I dunno, even-tempered, like discussing of barometric pressure in a closed system. Why’s everybody so pissed off about? If anything, I should be the one that’s mad because people are being fired for shitty reasons

I wouldn’t spend too long defending Jane either, but I would hope that people would see that blanket laws don’t cover every situation. If Jane did that, I would have to think hard why I shouldn’t fire her, YES in contradiction to my stated beliefs before, I didn’t consider this kind of situation. I’m making this up as I go along, but anyone who works for me and has that kind of malice towards my business and place of employment doesn’t seem to be able to make good decisions and/or decisions for the betterment of my company. With that news reporter that was fired, I think her actions were mostly harmless and, most importantly, not intended as an attack on the employer nor intended for the employer to find out. If Jane did what she did, its pretty clear she’s got some other agenda, one that I might not be able to see from her actions on the job, but I could never trust her again. I’ll take whatever grief you want to call me for this contradiction though, and I admit it is, but that goes to show that the world is more complex than it is. But a blanket and irreversible ability for employers to fire an employee for personal stuff? I’m still 100% against that. These things should be determined by a judge on a case by case basis, not an annoyed manager who simply wants to get rid of a problem instead of dealing with it

231

So you seem to be basing it on an admission of illegal conduct, and suggest that merely fantasizing about illegal conduct shouldn’t be fireable. Okay.

But in her list, I think she admitted, not to illegal conduct, but conduct that violates professional standards. Refusing to do stories on a group of people because of a personal bigotry is a violation of professional standards (if you really need a cite I’ll dig one up). Lying to the people you’re interviewing for no good reason (pretending to record them) is a violation of professional standards.

No, she wasn’t doing anything illegal, but she also was doing more than fantasizing about illegal activities: she was admitting to unprofessional activities engaged in as part of her job. That takes it beyond the personal and into work-related.

232

Firing someone isn’t censoring their speech. It’s a consequence of their speech, but their message hasn’t been touched.

An employer’s right of speech includes deciding who to hire and fire. I’m guessing you don’t agree with that interpretation, but again, I don’t think it’s defensible. Anything an employee does that reflects badly on his/her employer is speech, for better or worse.

233

I think this distinction is a little bit bogus. It’s not “prior restraint,” of course, but very few things in the US qualify as prior restraint. Imposing consequences for speech is a kind of censorship, given its chilling effect on that speech.

234

I agree with Delayed Reflex, this is a good thoughtful post.

Well this actually leads me to a grey area that makes me want to protect employees’ freedom speech. In the instance given, the employee was just running off at the mouth, not DELIBERATELY revealing informatin to harm the employer, but nonetheless harmful, and against company rules.

Now let’s consider another situation. A butcher’s assistant in a grocery store chain franchisee reveals in his blog that when steaks get old, they wash them in lye to freshen the meat’s appearance and keep it from turning gray, at the direction of the meat dept. manager. Now this info WILL harm the store’s reputation, BUT even though it is not illegal, I’d say it was something in the public interest to know. So I would tend to want to preserve this freedom of speech for employees, in the interest of getting useful information to the general public.

In much the same way suppose there was a website for reporting bad bosses. I think it would be great to know ahead of time that you were hiring into a hellhole of a biz run by a sociopath. It would be great if people could report bad bosses without fear of reprisal from the boss, under their real name so as to prevent anonymous attacks.

All sort of potential for social good here.

Agreed, not cool in each case.

Depends on whether she does it at the bar owner’s request. Most of the time, that’s who is behind watered down drinks.

A violation of federal law, IIRC. HIPAA and all that. Firing is the least of her worries.

If an employee publicly confesses to breaking company regs, I could see repercussions being allowable. But there would have to be a written company reg that she clearly was violationg.

No this language is just far too slippery, especially the last part. Far too easy to suppress almost all speech using that as a club.

And this is where we part company.

235

You’re young. You’ll learn.

236

New business failure rates in the US average around 50% (varying a lot by business type). Business owners do what they do largely in an attempt to keep heir business afloat, not because they wish to suppress employees’ freedoms.

237

Let’s go back about two hundred years and do some paraphrasing:

“Plantation owners have a failure rate of 10 percent. They do what they do largely in an attempt to keep their plantation afloat, not because they wish to supress employees’ freedoms.”

Profit motives are no excuse for trampling human rights.

238

Nice post Mr. Sharpton.

239

Is employment a human right?

240

Profit? Try survival. If I allow an employee to say/blog/whatever things they choose and that leads to the failure of the business then what about the remaining employees who all are unemployed now?