No. It goes to the basic idea of character and if I know someone has that kind of shit inside them, I can’t trust that it wouldn’t start to leak out. Now I can deal with the idea that other people see the world differently for me, and I’m probably not going to fire someone for being a Republican or having different views on heathcare or economics or public policy ( unless they are loud and obnoxious about it ). And that goes for people that are loud and obnoxious about any political opinion, including liberal ones.
Now, in real life things aren’t simple, and people are seldom fired for just one reason. And I might have a really low bar when it comes am employee that is substandard and easily replaced, who I might have even been keeping around out of sympathy. And I might put up with more for an exemplary employee with specialized skills.
But advocation of white supremacy or admiration for white supremacy groups is a deal breaker for everyone, it’s a safety issue for my other employees.
“Political view” is such a broad thing that it’s practically meaningless. Believing that people should be allowed to have sex with children is every bit a political position as believing in small government and low taxes. Frankly, I don’t want to live in a society where I have to wait until a card-carrying NAMBLA member is caught screwing a child while on the clock before I can actually fire him. I want to live in a society that allows me the freedom to remove such a high-risk individual the moment I find out about him. From a business stand-point, it would be ludicrous to wait until a harmful act is committed, since once there’s harm, potentially permanent damage has already been done to the company’s good name.
I wonder if the MAGAbomber had ended up terrorizing his coworkers instead of political figures, could they have made a case against their employer for ignoring the warning signs? It seems to me they could have.
This makes want to hurl. A platonic ideal that a manager is more concerned about keeping a steady driver than protecting their customers and employees from a radicalized bigot who espouses murdering minorities “all the time”? A few posts upstream, she’s quoted as saying his coworkers were subjected to his remarks and were bothered by them. Tough titty for them, though, right? She effectively paid him for the privilege of driving a van around town that illustrated his desire to see people killed for being the wrong race. Yet you insist on holding her up as some kind of saint for continuing him to employ him.
On the basis of your posts in this thread, she does sound more noble than you.
Your casual acceptance of racism and hatred being spouted in the workplace making it a hostile environment for other employees makes you a vile person. Neither one of you knows what nobility is. Peace and love hippies have jack shit to do with this.
Or she’s someone trying to do her job who made a bad call.
Yeah, that’s pretty close to my position (which is somewhat less hard line than yours). Not evil. But really: not laudable. It’s one thing when you get bigotry to your own face. It’s another when you expose your employees to it. And there’s something wrong and ill-considered about having the guy deliver your pizzas with his hate festooned van. Even if he does so in the dark. That reflects onto your business.
Oliver Willis on twitter: People asserting that the racism, misogyny and xenophobia embraced by the right is merely a point of view like “cut taxes” are engaging in white privilege. And frankly that’s not a term I like to use but it’s hard to see it as anything else. Every day these people demonize people who look like me and they’ve been at it for 3 solid years. I can’t look at that and just shrug that it’s merely “one point of view.” https://twitter.com/owillis/status/1056710151821058048
It’s reasonable to carve out extremism. One particularly serious signal is exterminationist rhetoric and imagery. If you can’t keep that out of the workplace, that’s a bright red flag.
Ah but maybe she could have persuaded him! If that’s the gambit then she should have tried, starting with a demand for professionalism in his window decals if he was going to represent the business with his preferred form of transport. That could be a proper starting point that JB99 alluded to.
I think it has more to do with too many people in this country not understanding what “freedom of speech” means. Just one more indication we are slip sliding into an idocracy.
The more I read about this woman, the more I’m over here shaking my head.
Debbie, I’m going to break it down for you. What he was expressing weren’t political beliefs. What people don’t understand is how you could get on national television and be so terrifyingly stupid.
I basically concur with your reasoning, but the presumption of self-correction may not always be true and the course of events may, in fact, be just the opposite. That’s what makes this such a challenging situation to deal with: by firing the guy, shunning him, and socially ostracizing him, it’s not only depriving him of a livelihood and sending him into financial desperation and destitution, but proving in no uncertain terms that’s he’s an outcast with no place in society. That can be very radicalizing – in fact, that’s how some westerners ended up joining ISIS, or more commonly end up just being criminals and occasionally domestic terrorists. Not because they were fired – and I hope my thoughts aren’t mischaracterized that way – but because more generally they were reduced to being total outcasts from society. The riots and unrest among Muslims in France is the result of just that kind of ostracization. OTOH, tolerating dangerous impulses can be equally dangerous. One needs to see both sides of it. His employer hardly seemed to have the mental capacity to be up to that challenge.
The only really good solution is to prevent the problem from happening in the first place, and to do that you need a society that doesn’t nurture hateful values, and doesn’t allow them to fester and grow. And the tragedy of the Trump era is that it’s the exact opposite, and he and his malignant base nurture hateful values just as surely as the Nazis did. The putative goal is to improve the lot of the common man against the forces allegedly arrayed against him, but the real beneficiaries are the white supremacists and ultranationalists. Guess who else did exactly the same? I still can’t get over how, when this guy was captured and his truck was found emblazoned with Trump-worship idolization and anti-Democrat hate, instead of even a hint of moral leadership all Trump could do was claim “it’s not my fault”!
Her getting into that guy’s van on *multiple occasions *, despite being terrified of him, says all I need to know about her intelligence.
How in the hell does she run a restaurant? If she sees a rat in the parmesan cheese, does she try to get rid of it? Or does she let the rat do his thing since he’s not really hurting anyone (as far as she can see) and besides, everyone’s entitled to food?
And someone has probably already mentioned this, but this opens the employer to all kinds of litigation under anti-discrimination laws.
Hypothetical Example: A Muslim works at a store. Another employee walks around talking about terrorists and ragheads and telling her she is going to hell for being Muslim. The employee is frightened by his hate speech. The employer is now open to legal liability for violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Lawyers would be stumbling over each other for the chance to represent her. That lawsuit would be a slam dunk.
And if this guy threatened someone and then committed an act of violence in the workplace, the employer could be found liable for failing to provide reasonable security against a foreseeable threat.
So even if someone doesn’t care about the moral reasons to keep bigots out of their workplace, there are practical ones as well.
BTW, Debbie didn’t own the business: “My mother used to tell me all the time, be kind to people, maybe he’s sick, maybe he’s suffering, maybe something happened to him. And that’s what I kept saying,” she said. “There were days I would go in the back and cry.”
Sayoc carried around a “beautiful” hunting knife in a suede pouch, but never got into fights with co-workers and did not seem like a threat, Gureghian said.
If he had his way, though, the United States would wipe Hispanics, blacks and gays off the map.
…
“Reliable, dependable, never had any customer complaints,” she said. “I couldn’t fire him. I’m not the owner. I’ve had other people threaten me when I had to fire them. I found him a threat to my emotional head, the toxicness, but I didn’t find him a threat that I was fearful of my life.”
Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article220734310.html#storylink=cpy No, Debbie isn’t laudable but she also isn’t a political philosopher. She manages a one shop pizza joint. Here’s a pic. I doubt whether she was familiar with Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance and I don’t expect her to be. Still, she made a bad call both morally and a business-wise I say: delivering food in a van that’s notoriously bigoted in your neighborhood isn’t good for business.
Ok, what if he doesn’t use the N-word, or go to tiki-torch rallies, but believes that the races weren’t meant to mix and believes in peaceful, voluntary racial separation? Should he be fired for that?
Millions of devout Muslims (and Christians) believe that gays will be burn in hell, based off the teachings of their religion. But religion is a protected class under law. If an employer reads a social media post from an employee approvingly quoting Leviticus, saying that God commands gays be put to death, is that a fireable offense, or would that be considered religious discrimination?
If he espouses that at work (thus disrupting the workplace), or publicly such that it might hurt the business (lots of people don’t want to patronize businesses that employ bigots), then I very well might. If he keeps it in his head and doesn’t talk to anyone about it, then I wouldn’t even know about it.
If the employee spouts these beliefs in the workplace (which is what Sayoc did), an employer can indeed fire them. Proselytizers are not a protected class.
I work with lots of Muslims. Never once heard any of them talk about gays burning in hell. Just like I’ve never heard Christians advocating stoning their children to death for lying.