My point may have been a bit of a hijack. I’m may end up starting a new thread on “at will” employment laws and whether political beliefs should be a protected category.
Several years ago, a coworker stole my paycheck from the register. He was caught on camera. He obviously deserved to be fired for this, and he was fired. Even then, I felt just the tiniest bit sorry for him. I’m not sure what happened to him after that.
A leader cannot be held hostage by his employees.
“What if he becomes enraged and tries to get revenge?” Is the kind of question we could ask for almost any disciplinary decision. It’s also irrelevant. The employee does not dictate terms. It’s the leader’s job to set and enforce the standards. If the employee fails to meet those standards, the employee gets fired. Whatever the employee does with his life after that point is not the leader’s responsibility.
All available evidence and experience reinforces the point that it is the leader’s obligation to preserve the organization’s values. And yes, I have fired employees for issues ranging from ethics violations to simple incompetence. It is sad and unfortunate, but keeping a toxic employee in your organization is even worse.
I think you may mean “at-will employment state”.
I think you may mean “at-will employment state”.
Irrelevant in terms of the employment, but if the owner(s) believes there is a serious and credible threat to their own safety, the safety of other employees, or the safety of customers, it is incredibly relevant and there is an ethical and moral duty as a human being (much less as a business owner) to inform the appropriate authorities about the threat.
That’s true of any serious, credible threat of physical violence, not just from a former employee. If I think my neighbor or my co-worker or some random person on the street poses an actual physical threat to innocent people, it may not be my responsibility but it’s still my duty to do more than wash my hands of it and proclaim it’s somebody else’s problem.
In order for “political beliefs” to come anywhere close to being a protected category, they would need to defined such that calls for genocide and other heinous acts that would make a reasonable person feel threatened would not count. Good luck coming up with such a definition.
Yes, I agree with all of this. Definitely relevant to the authorities and the employer should warn people of the danger. But my point was that the employee cannot be allowed to coerce the employer with threats of violence.
I can imagine these being delivered staggered too, but does this nut job have help?
IOKIYAR, same as in town. Next!
I would feel sorry for them, but that wouldn’t mean I wouldn’t fire him.
Here’s a hypothetical for you. You manage a pizzeria. Two people interview for a deliverer position and you can only hire one. You do a google search on both before making a selection. Candidate number one turns out to be a self identified Nazi who creates and disseminates racists memes via Facebook. There are pictures online of him attending Nazi marches. He moderates an alt-right message board and uses an avatar with his face on it.
Candidate number two doesn’t have much of an internet presence. The only thing that turns up when you google him is a innocuous MySpace profile.
Beyond these differences, both candidates have the same qualifications. They both are fathers to two little kids and are in bad need of a job.
Who will you hire? Someone’s kids are going to suffer regardless of whom you select; does this matter?
If you think the obvious pick is the second candidate, then what is the practical difference between firing the known Nazi and replacing him a non-Nazi vs choosing not to hire the Nazi in the first place?
While I’m in total agreement with your position, you with the face, try this one and see if the answer is still a slam dunk: Same pizzeria, but you have TWO jobs that need filling. Candidate #1 from your hypothetical is your ONLY applicant. Do you put a hire through?
Treating fascism/white supremacism as just another political ideology is comparable to treating cannibalism as just another culinary preference.
I see your point. If there were two equally qualified candidates, I’d pick the non-Nazi.
But my intuition is telling me that the bar for not hiring is lower than for firing them. I’d also weigh seniority into the decision. For example, if they’ve spent 10 years being an exemplary employee with no complaints and something suddenly turns up, I might let it slide for him. But then again, if I’m subjected to boycotts that threaten my business, I may cave into pressure despite my principled stance not to discriminate against people due to their beliefs.
Unlikely, as he left the pizza parlor in Jan 2018.
Not my money. Imagine she said that her business had certain standards, and among them was not using or advocating violence. Another involved the sorts of things you can paste on your delivery vans. Also hygiene. Basically she would set reasonable business boundaries.
It gets more dicey if she tells him not to post on Gab. But if he keeps his mouth shut, she wouldn’t know about it.
It’s true that she had a reasonable basis to fear for her safety: she said in an interview that she had problems with folks she had fired. Also true that firing him because she didn’t like his politics would be dangerous. But restraining orders exist for a reason.
After you’ve hired the Nazi, one of your employees says she feels threatened because she knows his stance includes wanting people that belong to groups she belongs to be murdered; what do you do?
Schedule them to work different shifts, so they don’t have to see one another.
If I’m desperate, I would be willing to consider it, believe it or not. But he’d know he could be let go the minute he failed to keep a lid on his Nazism and I caught wind of it.
Which tells the person feeling threatened that you don’t take it seriously and s/he should just suck it up and not be so damned sensitive.
That’s dodging the question. What if you can’t do that?