Ending at-will employment: a better remedy for cancel culture?

Employment law seems to me like a surface-level-reasonable way to prevent small mobs on twitter from spilling over into the real world.

So we're going to ask the boss to pretty please not fire people because of what they wrote on Twitter? Without any teeth behind it? I've seen it happen in my country: here's a few millions€, please don't sell the factory, please maintain all those jobs. One week later the factory closes and everyone is fired.

No.

If we agree on a social norm, "please" must be followed by "or else". Without "or else", my employer's freedom to fire me will naturally override my freedom to write what I like on HN. If we agree it shouldn't, we need to build an incentive structure where it doesn't.

Laws and regulations are pretty damn effective, as incentive structures go.

Let me prefix my remarks by noting that I'm not American and that I live in a country where at-will employment for the most part doesn't exist.

I disagree that getting someone fired from their job is merely a cultural problem. It's also a financial problem and hence a legal problem.

As I see it, if someone burglarizes your home, they're depriving you of the goods they steal. If you're arbitrarily dismissed from a job that you're performing perfectly well (including treating coworkers, clients, etc. correctly), you're deprived of the lost income. In either case, there's a financial loss involved and I fail to see why the law shouldn't try to protect the victim of such a loss.

I do agree that laws will never offer a complete solution to cancel culture, but a solution doesn't have to be complete to be justified, various partial solutions are OK.

Laws aren't the end in itself. Laws exist to help avoid social problems, and help keep society working.

This Cancel Culture is a major social problem. Society's tool to avoid social problems is to punish antisocial behavior through law.

Laws mean justice. Cancel Culture is politically-motivated mob rule.

Where do you draw the line between a disagreeable opinion v. something so abhorrent as to warrant cancelling someone's job, e.g. the use of racial slurs in spoken language?

Not rhetorical. Genuinely wondering.

Laws against discrimation exist exactly to protect against such things. And apparently discimination against political affiliation and political beliefes is growing.

"We" are not "one society" thus "we" cannot do anything collectively.

Even in the scope of "the United States," it's never been one society and it is even less so now that it is excessively "diverse" racially, ethnically, and culturally. As the United States becomes more diverse, the less chance there is to do anything "collectively" "as a society."

To my eyes, it's an extreme example of hubris that Silicon Valley employees who control various aspects of the Internet have arrogated to themselves the privilege to speak for "society" or create moral standards for others, all based on the fact they have control of various social media platforms.

Even if you may not have one belief and you have made an "ok" symbol to say "ok", if someone takes a photo, and they pretty much paint you as someone with a particular political belief, because you made a particular gesture that could perhaps be linked to a political belief, you may lose your job.

That's cancel culture.

It's simply easier to just do what the mob says otherwise you will get overwhelmed, in terms of handling PR, to begin with, when they can easily say "This company supports someone with a political belief, boycott them". You may not have the funds to defend yourself, and the time you spent investigating the issue could be also the amount of sales you may lose. So the easiest way out for you is to simply let this person go.

edit: added latest paragraph

The other word for cancelling someone is bullying them.

I assumed their thinking was that if the electrician was really doing the gesture they were fired for, the law would allow the firing. But the law would provide a recourse where the electrician could sue for their job back if it turned out the mob (and firing manager) were mistaken or didn't have sufficient proof.

I doubt such a law really would provide much cover for right wing people to bring them to the table, given the left has been redefining "hate" continually to cover more and more of the right half of the spectrum.

But those are shameful. They are a product of the free market, capitalist system with NO worker protections. This is why people end up working three jobs and still live under the poverty line, this is why people with degrees end up working at Starbucks.

Workers do not feel valued because they have been reduced to statistics, and the pandemic has made it blatantly obvious; ten MILLION people have lost their jobs in a span of weeks. The country will go into economic and social decline, while the 1% laughs all the way to the bank because the stock markets are doing just fine.

Isn’t that illegal?

Part of the problem is that it is quite hard to do so, or rather it is very error prone.

Something similar happens with the right to repair movement, it both cases it is very easy to mischaracterize both the problem and proposed solutions.

For me cancel culture is how easily mobs are created online calling for action on inconsistent criteria. But it is quite easy to identify this phenomenon with the propensity of corporation to listen to these mobs.

The case in the article was an electrician who lost his job, not a celebrity.

I feel that needs a bit of clarification. The reason nazi symbolism is restricted is because it is promoting an illegal political party. It is a disgusting ideology full of hate, but its symbolism isn't illegal because it is vile or hateful. The nazi party (NSDAP, and lot of other related smaller parties) has been ruled unconstitutional because it is explicitly against the German constitution. The same has been done with communist parties trying to overthrow the constitution, and you also have symbolism of the islamic state that is considered illegal.

My point is: the legal argument is based on the defense of the constitution, not on the fact that it is considered hate.

Germany also has regulation for hate speech, but that's not what is being used in the context of unconstitutional political parties.

Where the "hate speech" amounts to speculation that the availability of games like Call of Duty might well be deterring some former criminals from engaging in real-world criminal activity. It might be an uncomfortable opinion to some, maybe even a distasteful one, but people should be free to hold uncomfortable opinions.