I’m gonna need a cite for this claim, since it’s 100% incorrect. As I’ve noted above, there are some U.S. states that have protection for gays, and there are many counties, cities, towns, or other small jurisdictions that have local law protecting gays in that jurisdiction, but there is no federal law protecting homosexuals from discrimination on the basis of their sexual preference. For several years various legislators have tried to get Congress to pass The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) which would protect gays at the federal level from employment discrimination, but ENDA has never passed and is not law.
Badtz Maru, that sounds like a Texas version of the WARN Act. WARN is a federal law which requires that when a company lays off a lot of people under certain circumstances (such as when it closes a big plant) it must give the employees 60 days (IIRC) notice – or pay them for that long. I really don’t know much about WARN so I don’t want to comment further for fear of getting something wrong, but my reading of the OP seemed to indicate Priceguy was more asking about when an individual is fired, not when an entire facility is shuttered.
Another point which I should have brought up earlier is that so far the discussion on this thread has centered around a non-union shop. If an employee is covered by a collective bargaining agreement negotiated by his union, that CBA will almost certainly have provisions that limit the employer’s discretion to fire people without cause. So while it is perfectly legal, as we’ve said, to fire someone in a non-union shop because you don’t like their voice, in a unionized environment canning someone for such a frivolous reason would probably be a violation of the CBA.
Hey now, no need to jump down my throat. I said there was no law that specifically spelled out “you can’t fire someone because they’re homosexual”. But public opinion is different from laws but can work the same way.
describes how a man was fired from Kodak for speaking negatively about gays. He never sued and if Kodak were to turn around now and fire someone because they were gay they’d be in a shitstorm of public opinion trouble. And I apologize for the hatefulness of the article, but it’s the only one I could find on the story.
No, it can’t. You said that someone fired for being gay would “win in court.” While that’s true in some states and municipalities, in most of the U.S. it is wrong, regardless of what “public opinion” is on the matter (until such time as public opinion is strong enough to get protective legislation passed which applies to homosexuals). Negative public opinion might make such a firing a bad business decision, but until there’s a law, it is not illegal, and the employer would not lose a lawsuit about it.
I fail to see how the fact that one person was actually fired because of apparent anti-gay bigotry has any bearing whatsoever on whether someone can or cannot be fired for being gay. The fact that Kodak chooses not to fire people who are gay doesn’t mean that it would be illegal for them to do so, just as the fact that I choose not to skip down the street whistling the Theme From A Summer Place doesn’t mean it would be illegal for me to do that.
As I said above, please refrain from posting inaccurate information in General Questions.