Oh, please, I said Second Amendment when I mean First Amendment. Grow up.
Reduced freedom all around!!
I have noticed that people who often cry freedom usually mean that to be the freedom to suffer, the freedom to be exploited, the freedom to have everyday choices blow up in your face as to destroy them and their families.
I’m sure that the TV reporter just loves the freedom to be fired for joking on a blog. I’m sure the many people who have posted rants about their jobs on their personal Facebooks love having the freedom of their boss to snoop into their lives and be fired, I’m sure that the single-parent family suffering in poverty because the layoff that caused the parent to lose their job because their CEO can get a bonus believes in exactly the kind of freedom you do
Freedom is a means to an end, it is not intrinsically good in and of itself. If more freedom means more unhappiness, more poverty, more crime, and more suffering, then I wish we have less freedom, as much less as it takes to lower poverty, lower crime, and lower suffering
If you love freedom so much, move to Somalia. I hear they don’t even have laws there, its paradise :rolleyes:
I asked before, and didn’t get an answer.
Should Paula Deen have been let go? Should she get her contract back with the Food Network?
should Charlie Sheen have been let go for the smack talk he spouted about the cast? He was on his off time…
Or, “If you love freedom so much, why don’t you marry it!”
Next time, try that one. It’s got more zing than the “Why don’t you move to Russia!!” bullshit.
I’m sure there is a Ben Franklin quote that covers this…
Yeah, it’s good to know that slavery would be a-okay as long as the beatings stopped and everyone got to retire at 50. Because, you know, freedom isn’t a good thing in and of itself.
Facebook makes it very simple to control who can and can’t see what you post. If you’re careless or dumb enough to post rants about your job that are visible to everyone, you run a much greater risk of consequences. It’s the difference between sending a letter to someone and staking a sign in your front yard.
Well, does that mean every single thing the FF’s did and said is therefore worthless?
(Franklin became an abolitionist and released his slaves by 1770, long before the Constitutional Convention.)
Based on this reply, I think you’re misreading my intent. My statement wasn’t meant to be a critique of the founding fathers, just a comment on the assertion that freedom isn’t a good thing.
My apologies for misreading your reply. :smack:
I was not asserting that freedom is not a good thing.
The Ben Franklin quote I had in mind is “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
I know. My reply was confusing.
When your everyday choice puts your ability to do your job at risk, it’s your fault when it blows up in your face.
A TV reporter isn’t hired to read the news. Any literate person with functioning vocal cords can read the news. A TV reporter is hired to attract viewers, as are TV chefs and sitcom actors and football players. Creating a lousy personal image puts that at risk.
It would be pretty silly of me to say what I said and still support those firings, right? So no, Paula Deen, as much as I personally despise her for being an old timey racist who claimed she couldn’t change her views, did not deserve to be punished by her job for what she did on her own time
HOWEVER, and this is a big however, I seemed to have overlooked a crucial aspect of this employer/employee relationship. Paula Deen is a franchise unto herself. Her media empire consists of TV shows, books, recipes, and probably a lot of other stuff. She doesn’t fit neatly into the typical mold of employee/employer relationship. Her relationship can be argued as being an independent contractor. In that sense, I would hold that they deserve less protection, simply by the fact that she’s an employer herself. Plus, if I understand her situation correctly, her contract was not renewed, she wasn’t fired in the traditional sense.
As for Charlie Sheen, I read that some of his behavior extended to being on the set, so the above does not apply to him. He was doing this at work so he deserved to be fired
So, your turn. Government employee unions offer lots of protection for firings, and firings and discipline generally have to be done through proper channels while giving employees the option to contest it. The US hasn’t blown up yet, and despite what decades of Republicans have been saying, the country has survived just fine. Why not make sure all employees in every industry have those protections? Its absolutely not a radical concept, millions of government employees work just fine under this plan every day
And I’ve said in the past that I don’t care if its the stupidity of the employee itself that was the cause, personal behavior should be protected
It might be your fault, but giving the employer the means to fire you for that is still too much power to hand over. If they feel she was damaging the brand, then move her to a desk job and take her off the air. And generally, I consider it secondary for an employer to make a profit. Its first duty should be to provide the service, make the product, or whatever it is that the business does. That’s why I feel the government union model serves as a good standard upon which all employees should belong to. Government provides a service, and yes, it tries to profit when it can and reduce waste and increase efficiency, but its first duty is to provide that service. The news is the service, and she can read it whether or not she’s afraid of old people. Her personal blog has no impact upon reading the news
Good, problem solved. From here on out, companies just use contractors instead of hiring full-time employees.
Because that is the way things will trend if you take away the employer’s right to hire who they wish and the employee’s ability to choose amongst employers.
Yup, that’s what would happen. No one would have job security because they’d all be on limited time contracts. The law of unintended consequences would be strong here.
IMHO, no. I’ll explain more below.
:eek: Even at the point of going into the red, financially?
Who makes up the finacial shortfall? The owners & stockholders? For how long? Or will the Government provide corporate wellfare to keep those folks employed?
I disagree with a lot of assumptions and assertions in that paragraph.
- The role of Government HAS NOTHING to do with profit. And it should not.
Once the Government starts making decisions based on a profit model, short cuts are made. That’s why “Obamacare Death Panels” fears got so much traction with some people. (For example: Some faceless beauracrat was going to decide it wasn’t worth spending the tax money to extend the life of a sick individual.)
Note that this is NOT the same as saying that Government does not have to provide a good value of service for the tax money invested, either.
- I do not agree that the Government is a model (or strives to be) for efficiency and lack of waste. It appears to be even more wasteful, etc, when the government does not have to compete with anyone else in providing some particular service.
I kinda favor letting someone who actually has experience in the news buisness deciding on their own whether she hurt their station’s brand…
When we hired the position in the U.S. it was four months from deciding we needed someone to starting date. That is four more months of a paycheck to an employee.
And U.S. public sector jobs are very different than corporate jobs - the accounting system isn’t the same, the budgeting isn’t at all close. Therefore the behaviors you create in managers and decision makers are very different than what you get in private industry.
Not to the extreme that the company would cease to exist, no. But companies don’t have the right to maximize their profits at whatever cost. It would be cheaper to use slave labor, for example, but we have rules against that. We all know its better for a company to pay workers, give them pensions and retirements, and health insurance, even though it would cost the companies more, than to have unpaid slaves. That’s the tradeoff. Its not a radical idea.
Companies should be able to suffer some small financial setback in return for providing employees with more stability. Henry Ford knew this and paid his workers relatively high because then those same workers would be able to buy his products. The same principle works here. Who really benefits from having a bunch of poor, easily fire-able, low paying grunts around? Only the CEOs, and only temporarily. There’s a reason why Apple doesn’t just move its entire operation to Africa where they can pay people dirt cheap wages: nobody can afford their products then
I’m not asking for all companies to operate in the red, but where people say I should learn the lessons of Detroit, I tell them to learn the lessons of Enron, or WorldCom, where executives fleeced the pensions and value of a company and, for the most part, got away with it. I’d rather that power be more skewed towards the employees
Uh, I think you got my argument totally backwards. I said the first duty of a government entity is to provide a service, and profit can and should only be made as an ancillary result
You’re talking about its service model, I was talking about its employee relations model. There is nothing intrinsically limiting about a union which provides protection to its employees that limits efficiency, the keywords here being “intrinsically limiting”. In practice, it can, but it doesn’t always happen and government provides plenty of good service that, in the free market, would cost way above what it may cost now. And I understand that the fear is that without competition, big service providers can become lazy, but the same thing is true of monopolies. And again, nothing about that argument has to do with worker protection. Change up the government model if you must, but there is nothing wrong, or economically damaging, about giving all employees the power to challenge their punishments. It holds management accountable and that should be something we’re all in favor of
You are talking about something else now. Cheesesteak said that anyone can read the news. That’s the debate, this report can read the news. If its branding you’re talking about, then it should be weighed against employee protection. You wouldn’t, I assume, be in favor of a station whose brand is that they only have white people as anchors. Having a non-white may hurt the brand, but so what? Same thing with this topic, so what if she harms the brand? I contend that the harm is tiny, and the punishment is extreme. Let the brand be hurt a little if it will preserve her job
I understand that the lag time isn’t ideal, but it won’t break any company to take some time to hire the right person. And what is it about corporate management that you are afraid will happen given their difference with the public sector?
LOL. How do you think that would affect the employment rate if you applied it to every position within an economy?