rarebit feminist?
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Do people get canned for opinions very often, though? The abusive harasser in the article tied to this one got canned, but it wasn’t for his opinions - it was his behavior. If you think that white people are better than black people and gay people are gross, you’re holding a very common opinion people are virtually never fired for, if they did it’d be economic carnage. When you decide to don a white hood and burn crosses with your local terrorist cell, you’re past opinions, and into territory more likely to get you canned.
There are counter-examples like the religious school canning the teacher for saying Muslims and Christians worship the same God, the factory in Iowa that fired employees for having Obama bumper stickers on their cars, etc., but firings over opinions in America are not usually because the employee’s a racist.
In general the unfair and troubling firings in this territory (and non-hirings) happen because of the bigotry of business owners/bosses who very rarely give a crap if their employees are racist. Gay people can and do get canned for being gay many orders of magnitude more often than racists get fired for being racists. If you want to wring your hands over people being unfairly fired, there are far bigger fish to fry.
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Hrrrnnn… hmmmmMMMnnn
I think I must have a… cutting onions… in my eye…
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All of this is what I said above. At Will Employment is far more often used to discriminate rather than fire discriminators. I’m not opposed to bigots facing job loss as a possible consequence of their behavior, but that sacking as the first and last consequence is not very productive since it puts all the power to deal with harmful opinions/behavior in the power of employers. And bosses are not even consistent about who gets fired and for what.
What I’m arguing for here is that we should not see the occasional firing of a publicly outed bigot as justice served, but that we need a permanent system for dealing with these issues that is both accountable & consistent, and not solely to be used at the discretion of employers. This is something that should be tackled through public legislation because the power imbalance in the workplace is more likely to be used to further discrimination than end it.
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Some people are values voters. I’m a values employer. Many jobs above the entry level, and a good number at the entry level, require composure, poise, and the ability to work with or for other people different from you.
This isn’t an “outed bigot.” This is a man who was harrassing another person, including making not-so-veiled threats about her safety.
I’m not sure what I’d feel comfortable hiring a guy like this for. Raking leaves, maybe?
As an employer, I want the best team I can recruit and retain. I’ve got no time to provide employment welfare to shitstains out of some misplaced bleeding heart compassion that no one bothered to raise them right.
Let me know how I did. 1-800-I-DO-CARE
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Cynically, I suspect employers fire people like this because they’re bad press, not because they’re toxic to work with - presumably this guy was always an asshat and hadn’t been fired before he went viral.
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Well, if somebody can’t act like an adult when interacting with other people then I’m all for them not getting treated like one. This whole ‘they turned 18 and therefore are an adult’ is part of the reason why we have this absurd race to the bottom in our society.
As far as I’m concerned logic, reason, and civility should be things we’re required to learn and digest before graduating and joining the rest of society.
They’re not complicated concepts (less so than plenty of our graduation requirements) and a world where they’re a mandatory part of the educational process would be a much better one than the one we live in now.
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Very badly, absolutely missed my point which I have said over and over again in this thread. I never said there shouldn’t be consequences including being fired, I said that the this shouldn’t be left entirely to employers because “values employers” are way more likely to fire LGBT people than racists. And when I talk about bigotry I don’t distinguish it from violence, since discrimination causes real material harm to people. Snark works much better when you bother to fucking read what I said.
So, there have been a couple threads very recently dealing with issues like this. I think nerves are still raw, and noone is going to be convinced regardless of who has the most salient arguments.
As @enso said, it may be time to jettison thread.
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To be fair to the concept, @enso has made his ‘people should be free to be assholes to other people without consequence’ stance pretty clear (with the usual ‘because it may interfere with things that have nothing to do with interacting with other people because logic is confusing’ addendum), so I’m not sure that’s the best source for opinions on this particular subject matter.
The freedom to be able to get away with ‘accidentally’ crossing some pretty grade-school-level lines is pretty important to some people…just in case.
Just sayin 
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At some point, without the overtones of extreme bigotry or misogyny, we should start a calm thread on the subject. But this week doesn’t work for me 
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That’s not a bad idea!
It’d be nice if we could get a bunch of non-Americans in on it too, we have a very specific view of what our ‘freedoms’ should be in this country that isn’t necessarily the consensus among humans…when you’re only aware of the one way of living the idea of others being out there can be jarring!
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To say that this is “entirely left to employers” ignores the important, and strengthening, role of equal protection clauses in employment law. I’m a fan of Title 7 and expansions to same.
I think that’s a better tool than advocating that good bosses shouldn’t fire bad employees because then bad bosses will fire good employees.
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mumble no-cause dismissals are so flipping hard to litigate against in wrongful termination suits you might as well eat glass before bringing one up mumble mumble
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[quote=“funruly, post:74, topic:71626”]
To say that this is “entirely left to employers” ignores the important, and strengthening, role of equal protection clauses in employment law.[/quote]
You know the US has At Will Employment law so people can be fired without cause? And employees have the burden to prove that their dismissal was the result of discrimination if they want to get compensation? Like this is why I’ve been saying that this is best handled through hate speech legislation because labor law has such shitty protection for workers (protections that should be expanded too).
The downside of confidential settlement agreements is that they are confidential, so you and I never know how often they happen.
The upside of confidential settlement agreeements is that they allow company leaders to see exactly how much extra it costs to employ assholes.
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Let’s sidebar this discussion.
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Crabid
Which is algothan for the good comment.
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