Fired comedian ordered to get day job back after jokes ruled 'simply funny'
vice.com
vice.com
In context, the complaints about the material itself seem pretty pretextual.
Edit
A frustrating detail here, just in the sense that it's petty turtles all the way down here: the arbitrator found that WHYY's social media policy, which prohibits "inflammatory" speech without qualification, was in fact binding and did provide WHYY with cause to terminate (the arbitrary was vocal about how stupid they felt this policy was).
The reason Grievant got the reinstatement order was that WHYY's HR fucked up their own process and committed to the termination procedure without including Grievant's direct manager in that process. A pure technicality.
In any event, good work by the SAG AFTRA legal team, and it's nice to have the arbitrator overturn this kind of petty bullshit.
It reads to me like HR at WHYY picked a turf fight and, in losing it, cost WHYY a quarter million dollars. The original HR instigator appears to have been promoted.
This adds a huge amount of context to this article. A big issue was that he was doing comedy, it's that he was doing it on company time.
The article mentions things like "raises concerns about the boundaries of remote work" and I was completely confused why they kept bringing up working from home if the article was bout inflammatory jokes.
I'll add that I am on Jad's side here, but the full un-biased picture is important.
Here's a note sent to him by his immediate manager (who was supportive but cut out of the firing decision):
> Hey Jad, I just want to give you a heads up that somebody within WHYY is agitating about your stand-up comedy stuff. I have gotten questions from HR – in terms of “How come Jad can do stand up but he can’t work in the office?” And somebody even reached out to Bill [Marrazzo, CEO] [...] I have no idea who that person is – or why they are doing this. So far, I have been able to deflect any inquiries, and I said that your doctor is most worried about stress. I said that being in the office causes you stress, whereas stand-up comedy does not. [...]
To make a case that coming into an office to work causes you undue stress, but that standing up in front of a bunch of people to do comedy does not, is a big stretch. Seems like an abuse of medical leave, to me.
Just about anything that "raises concerns about remote work" simply means one or more pro-office people have used it as an excuse to question remote work. Companies rarely question the boundaries of in person work when firing employees for actions caught while representing the company off hours (driving company vehicle, wearing company uniform).
As I understand it, SAG-AFTRA already has a general concern (not confined to this specific case) about how WFH affects the working conditions of employees:
> “Something that the union is kind of concerned about is the way remote work has changed the way we work,” Sleiman said. “We’re always online, on Slack and shit, so when are we off the clock?
> The arbitrator was not a fan across the board. They found that one joke was “insightful, principled and serious, but not very funny.” Sleiman said he was disappointed by this review.
My favorite part is probably when the arbiter explains how "the use of the word “fuckable” when applied to elderly women approaching their grave can be interpreted as mildly inflammatory"
First, the transcript of the routine:
Believe me, even woke people kind of hate Muslims don’t they? Yup. “Refugees are welcome…to start treating their women a little better.” Wait, it is true that like women are treated a little better in the west for a while. After like 35, 40 it gets pretty brutal, doesn’t it? There’s no retirement age for looking hot in the west. That’s why you see American grandmas wearing makeup and shit. American women have to be as fuckable as possible until they’re dead, which I don’t think is fair. Y'all I want to start a rescue charity that helps women of a certain age move to Saudi Arabia. They’re gonna be like, “What, I don’t gotta to do botox or dye my hair?” I’m like, “Lady, you don’t even gotta drive. In fact, yeah, they prefer you didn’t.”
And here's the analysis:
The first half is hardly inflammatory, suggesting that Americans encourage Muslim refugees to treat their women better, and that women in the west are generally treated better than in Muslim countries, at least for a while. Grievant then opines that after a woman in the U.S. becomes 35 or 40, it gets “pretty brutal,” which is provocative but cannot be interpreted as inflammatory. He then states that older women in America are expected to continue looking “hot,” resulting in American grandmothers wearing “makeup and shit.” So far, it cannot be interpreted as inflammatory. He then states: “American women have to be as fuckable as possible until they’re dead, which I don’t think is fair.” Although the first clause is debatable and grossly articulated, the second clause plainly states that Grievant believes it to be unfair, so any claim that the clip shows him to be demeaning women in the clip, as charged by management, is patently unfair and untrue. On the other hand, the use of the word “fuckable” when applied to elderly women approaching their grave can be interpreted as mildly inflammatory.
The final few sentences in which he proposes starting a charity to help women move to Saudi Arabia, where they do not have to use botox or dye their hair and they are encouraged not to drive cannot be interpreted as inflammatory and are simply funny.
I also love how the analyst is trying to be objective as possible and their own dry delivery makes it all twice as funny.
> I have gotten questions from HR - in terms of “How come Jad can do stand up but he can’t work in the office?”
Probably why the attacks on the clips are so weak. High up guy was being petty. But they couldn't fired him for not being in the office.
I hope someone here has a valid link...
Or on a promotional poster: “Not very funny. — Arbitrator [name]”
Sounds straightforwardly punitive and cruel behavior to me, not just cowardly, overzealous CYA stuff.
Most Americans (roughly 70%) are happy with their health insurance. That's a reason to be defensive other than it "being the status quo".
And I pay more for this, just in terms of my monthly premiums, not to mention all of the out of pocket and deductible costs, than I would in taxes for healthcare in just about any other developed country.
I don't know what metric people are using when saying that they are "happy" with their health insurance, other than comparing it to being uninsured in this country, in which case, sure, it beats that.
The medical system in the U.S. is awful, and it really is broken that it is tied to a job.
A system where you need to be well enough to work to get care to work is obviously not ideal.
There are enough “easy” solutions if the only goal is well-being of the citizen. That’s not always the priority for some obscure reason
Besides decoupling the insurance from employment to facilitate career changes and even quitting, it would also bring down the average price of insurance for people who currently get it on the individual market as the average corporate worker is statistically healthier than the rest of the population.
Eliminating the tax deduction is not enough as even at break even the company offering health insurance is a net win from the lower risk pool. It had to be an additional penalty / tax.
It’s not really “easy” to reform/change anything this significant in the US. It is not like a European country with a functioning modern parliament that can make laws. In the US system both major parties have to agree in order to pass anything of substance, which due to hyper-polarization means essentially nothing gets passed.
The US healthcare system is stuck in a deep local minima. The cost of transitioning to a different equilibrium is so high that it is obviously politically infeasible any most if not all States. I don't like the current system but if there was a viable path to a different model, at least some States would have taken it.
I don't know anything about Pennsylvania, maybe it's easier there.
My father had MS, and he was considered a fraud (back in the 70s). Of course, such is easily said if there are no repercussions (I, parent of two young children, have been called a pedophile by my neighbors ...). It is very likely he also had autism, like me, a burden to function in society and a mark on your forehead cause "you're weird".
I've been suffering from a burnout (related to my neighbor's behavior) since start last year and when I applied for benefits because I got fired I've been told I should've reported myself fully healed earlier. I've also been asked questions to which the answers weren't written down because (and I quote) "I'm not allowed to ask that question".
If you apply for any social benefits, society considers you a fraud and you have to prove you're not. This is immense work, more so for people who suffer from disabilities (likely those who rightfully apply).
Oh, and then you get denied. Multiple times.
This country would rather "useless" (read: cant make money for capitalists) people die.
They just usually cannot afford it, even though there are subsidies available, most people will not earn or save enough to pay the deductibles / out of pocket max.
I ended up waiting for Medicare eligibility anyway which, with supplemental and prescription drug coverage is probably not nearly as much cheaper as a lot of people assume.
In the 1960s when healthcare costs began to rise there was a conversation around changing it, but by 1970s it was concluded that on balance tying it to employment had benefits in reducing labor action (strikes), which was a big concern back then. We've stuck with it since.
On the other hand, as long as you have that card everything is really cheap, which is definitely not true in the US.
Gradually these perks started to become as important of a consideration as the salary itself. Unfortunately health insurance is easily misused. We started relying on it to pay for all health care, rather than to actually mitigate the risk of a sudden medical bill. The result has been a rapid and continual increase in the price of health care over the last 70–80 years caused directly by the fact that nobody pays for the services they use, but instead pays into insurance plans that then pay for the care.
In fact, I think this guy overstated the risk to his health. If you get fired you don’t actually lose your insurance. You sign up for continuation of coverage from COBRA, taking over payments for the insurance from your employer, and then purchase an individual or family insurance plan of your own before COBRA runs out. Or get hired somewhere else and sign on to one of their insurance plans. Either way you’ve lost nothing, at least in terms of health care.
I don't think it's as simple as that. Empirically, lots of countries have health insurance systems whose incentive structure could be described in the same way, yet the US is an extreme outlier in healthcare costs. Something else must be going on.
Health insurance and healthcare is NOT tied to your employer in the US.
However, many employers pay 50% to 70% or even 100% of the health insurance premiums for their employees, and employees can use pre tax income to pay health insurance premiums if purchased by their employer.
The problem has always been this tax advantage of your employer purchasing it, AND most Americans opting to not purchase it due to cost.
Note that there are significant subsidies available if you earn less than 400% of the federal poverty level, although that may still leave many unable to purchase it (or the deductible/oop max is so high it would not make any difference).
Also, the age rating factors being capped at 3 allows older people’s health insurance premiums to be much lower before age 65, although I maintain that this young to old wealth transfer is not beneficial for society.
COBRA is good insofar that it lets people know the real cost of health insurance.
Thats the cost for covering everything under the sun + every bad habit + risky behavior. Instead of you know: emergencies, no fault accidents, and unexpected genetic problems. (Like, say car insurance)
Not only is this a strange opinion, that you want some kind of entity to decide whether or not each of our health conditions are at-fault, your analogy to car insurance isn't even true in no-fault states, of which there are many.
Comedian: yeah for them
Made me laugh out loud. Wish I had that kind of confidence!
Of course, tinged with his Scottish brand of existential dread.
I get the joke but that execution was .. awful. Must be a Scotch delicacy sort of thing and I'm just not used to the flavor. No American would stand there for 2 minutes asking the same person "Where's the printer?" over and over again.
It might've been funny if he walked around the office asking other "Limmys" where the printer was and got all sorts of different reactions from them, but he half-assed it and made it a tiresome joke by sticking with that one tiring interaction.
I'm not sure the fact that he's Scottish has much to do with your appreciation of the comedy in the linked sketch per se. It falls into a tradition of British sketch comedy which is quite different in style to improv originated sketch comedy in North America - more confronting and unsettling.
Before you completely write it off, watch a few episodes of the series, or look at his Twitter.
Strangely enough, I grew up in Germany and the only German show I remember at all is Asterix and Obelix but that may have been a language barrier thing.
I'll check it out!
Here's the rule about comedy: either you get it, or you don't and move on. The deeper you dive in, the more unbearably cringy it becomes, and no one will ever be able to convince you whether it is actually funny. Let it go, man.
Here's one to cheer you up: time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Also I think the joke is Scottish agnostic, it would have worked for me in an accent, if I'd have seen an American doing it, and insisting to stick with it, it would still be funny. Wouldn't feel out of place on "I think you should leave right now".
the other meme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzKo1JPNf4s
The other part of the ruling is being forgotten here I think. It says he has to take down his social media clips.
If it were me, I wouldn't. That said, I can see where people have legitimate money concerns. They have to live.
Did anyone actually find them inflammatory, or was the justification that "someone" "might" find them inflammatory? If some individual raised a complaint that's one thing, but sounds like a massive overreaction.
> in 1966 I discovered that something very good had happened: the race question had disappeared from the security clearance form. In fact, this question disappeared from nearly all government forms then. I liked to think I helped that change along.
> I have argued that all historical and present racial and ethnic classification systems for individuals are nonsensical and so are the laws, court decisions, computer applications, and bureaucratic superstructures that have been built on top of them.
I’m regularly asked that question in official contexts in the last few years. American companies make hiring decisions now based on racial identification. Big companies even require their vendors and service providers to factor race into staffing decisions.
It’s illegal under American law, but in the last decade or so corporate HR departments have gotten some funny ideas.
Virtually every good joke could be considered, "inflammatory" by someone.
Not very long ago in developed countries "agitating for women's suffrage" or "kissing a person of the same sex" or "a white woman marrying a black man" would be inflammatory. In many places it still is.
But many people have said essentially the same thing, over the course of many years. I think there’s a moment for each of us when we realize that our worldview isn’t substantially similar to that of others anymore, especially younger people.
> The arbitrator said that he read this policy as not incorporating a “reasonable person” standard, meaning that workers “must be vigilant not to post anything on social media that could conceivably be interpreted as inflammatory even by highly sensitive and thin-skinned individuals without an appreciation for irony or satire.”
I guess you can't really do that with standup comedy since your face and voice are clearly visible and audible.
We got on pretty well while pairing and after a few weeks he let me know his secret under the condition that I couldn't let anyone on the team know. His concern really was having HR getting wind of this and scouring the internet for material.
I mean. Maybe he did, and he wisened up this time and didn't tell anyone about it after he picked a new name to continue doing it under.
In fact, the employer still wins:
> As part of the decision, Sleiman was to delete the nine videos cited. He was also asked to delete any “offensive post-discharge” posts where he disparaged the company for his firing.
It's much safer to lay low and don't say anything too provokative, but that's a danger to a healthy democracy.
I suppose that, as you say, they are worried about adding fuel to the fire by firing the parties who were actually at fault. Personally, I doubt it would. What's most likely to happen is that they get it wrong in both cases: first, damaging their reputation by firing someone who didn't do anything, and then later not firing someone who did damage their reputation, thus damaging their public reputation (perhaps) and hurting their internal reputation and morale (one would assume).
It will. In this example, publicly firing the guy who ordered Sleiman's termination can be construed as "American firing Hamas Sympathizer fired and sympathizer reinstated"
A culture war is a two way street. No reason to further fan the flames.
It’s like the difference between a salesman ranting on Facebook about how a competitor sucks, versus a marketing campaign that’s an attack ad on a competitor.
Probably a wise strategy - and a useful background to have when fighting the sort of people who sack others for jokes on contentious subjects.
He is also able to afford rent and food.
I mean, you've got social commentary about "the court said this was a solution, let's see how it goes" and "everyone says getting the courts to order your employer to give you your job back is a pyrrhic victory, but what happens when you do it?" and you've got the cringe angle of the awkward interactions with HR and the bosses who fired you, and the justice porn angle of bullying a bad employer.
Plus if he decides he doesn't want the job any more, he can always put the posts back up and see what happens.
Also, this guys is a good comedian. I've done stand up (and even killed before) and that shit is HARD.
Add to that the discipline of delivering the lines with the right timing, tone and pace.
Stand up comedians are some of the smartest people I've come across. Also, they're some of the most f'd up people i've met too. Its a weird combo, but I like them a lot.
Wait—you can do that!? I thought the whole point of arbitration was that you committed to the arbiter's decisions, no matter what, to lower legal costs.
> “Like, ‘What do you mean? You’re off hours, you’re having fun with, like, creative expression, of course you should get fired for that,’ ” he said. “But I hate that that’s become normal. And I want to be an example of like, no, your employer doesn’t own you.”
This is a terrifying state of affairs. Similar to the whole "all code you write, on or off hours, belongs to us" some tech companies try to pull.
One is primarily companies not wanting to take any risk that IP could walk out the door through off hours work.
The other is that for sufficiently visible and controversial off hours activities, it’s hard to divorce the person 100% from their employer and that’s a PR problem and a distraction many employers are quick to remedy.
When I was an industry analyst, anything I said related to the industry even on a personal blog or Twitter account was (somewhat reasonably) taken as my professional opinion not really separable from what I wrote as part of my job.
I've heard a story about someone from Europe travelling to the US to work for IBM. He was in the process of choosing a house, and was told that it was too modest. That is, "not the kind of house expected of an IBM engineer". Clearly in the US the line between your job and personal life is so blurry it's often hard to even see.
From my perspective this looks like a problem in and of itself, but it gets magnified tenfold when coupled with "at will" employment and work-tied health insurance: it means your employer owns you, 24/7. Isn't slavery supposed to be abolished?
Then there are the obvious Free Speech implications. The US has supposedly freer speech than Europe, but how free is your speech really is if your employer can fire you and terminate your health insurance the instant your boss stumbles upon something you said he didn't like?
Hmm really? Citation needed.
The point is that it doesn’t have to be controversial at all. They can fire you for whatever reason they want. He didn’t cross any lines because there was never any line to begin with. His healthcare is at the mercy of a dictatorship.
Take the ability to control who they associate with out of the hands of a media company and you doom them to being burned by the court of public opinion. Reputation is all a news outlet has.
(It is, perhaps, worth noting that the arbiter didn't disagree with this line of reasoning. Return to employment was conditional on Jad deleting the offending material, so he's not to the place he wants to be regarding the eating of his cake and the having of his cake. It may still be the case that his two desired activities are incompatible with each other).
If you hire someone as a personality (e.g. radio reporter, CEO) their actions at all times clearly affect you. No perfect solution will exist.
They'll lose close minded people and gain a lot of open minded ones. The open minded tend to have a healthier mental state, have higher income, and attract more ad revenue.
And I don't think it's likely that the firing was motivated by the fear of bad financial results, but ideologically driven.
They already have all the listeners of that category that they're going to have.
Stuff happens. I'm unfairly held accountable for my gender, my age, the way I dress, and so on. I have to suck it up; so should WHYY.
I think US law (I'm not USAian) is extremely liberal in the kinds of contracts it allows employers to impose on staff. I think that's cause for regret; unless you're paying someone to work for you 24/7/365, or the employment contract explicitly says "No off-colour jokes, even on your own time, and we decide what off-colour means", then the employer has to find some other excuse for getting rid of the joker.
But I believe that in most of the USA, an employer can fire an employee for any reason or none. That makes hiring people a lot less risky; but it makes employment much more precarious. It's a rule that makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker, and I personally think it's a bad rule.
Is his work good and true? That’s all that matters for his employer’s reputation.
This idea that journalists have to appear to be impartial ascetics should die. They are humans, and humans have perspectives no matter how they hide them. The hiding is what provides the fuel that a journalist is biased as if it’s a conspiracy. Knowing where the writer's coming from can be illuminating, and I can weight their biases myself.
That's not how reputation works.
Just like Tesla was recently caught having their employees in Sweden sign contracts like that, including terms that prohibited employees from talking about anything going on at Tesla, even after the left the company, for life...
> Among other things, employees agree to never, ever tell anyone anything about the company. Employees also have to pay a fine if they quit Tesla and take a competing job within six months.
https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/sverige/tystnadsplikt-livet...
Seems like it's a US tactic that now is trying to be spread into other parts of the world. Terrifying indeed.
Good luck monitoring that enforcing that
Also, pretty sure that goes against the 1st amendment and if memory serves right, no contract can change people’s federal rights or change any laws
Edit: had a derp moment and totally commented without remembering the “Sweden” key word here. Ignore me, I’m wrong for many reasons
I'm pretty sure it does not. Tesla is not the government and Musk is not, yet, president. There is precious little in the US constitution governing employer-employee relations. In fact, by not allowing such agreements, any government arguably violates the contracts clause. The US constitution frees people, which includes granting them freedom to sign stupid contracts.
Have you ever been part of a corporate re-org where you were technically laid off and rehired and thus were legally forced to sign a new agreement? Such freedom!
All "contracts" that fit a pattern of take-it-or-leave-it with a zillion provisions should be negotiated by the government, a union, or some other collective entity with a reasonable claim to protecting the interests of the side that has no leverage alone.
Plenty of agreements are heavily constrained by regulators, (think insurance for example) and we take it for granted, so I am not suggesting any radical idea, just pushing back on the weasels who are always working at corrupting things.
will never be.
>> pretty sure that goes against the 1st amendment
Pretty sure the 1st amendment you're talking about doesn't apply in Sweden :)
But monitoring for life doesn't seem feasible. But they don't really have to. Just making people believe they can be penalized at any time can change their behavior.
> Good luck monitoring that enforcing that
Unenforceable rules still have plenty of value in something called a "chilling effect" which people - even fully aware of an unforceable law - will still alter their behavior out of fear that they could somehow become entangled in it anyway. They preempt decision-making for many people.
There are some legal limits on this. Things like the rule against perpetuities limit any sort of forever construct. The interesting question is whether someone bound by such a contact in life can perhaps speak after death: A book written privately in life but published publicly after death. That might be a case where general legal principals would win out over a corporate NDA.
The contract does not attempt to modify the protection of your free speech rights from government interference, so no.
(“But a government apparatus would enforce the contract, and corporations are chartered by the government, and anyway what good is a system that protects rights from the government if lots of people end up losing them to powerful organizations anyway?” Yes, yep, mmm-hmm. Welcome to left-libertarianism.)
(And, as the other poster noted, this is Sweden anyway, so the US constitution and bill of rights is irrelevant anyway)
Hopefully there is a silver lining, where he (and other radio people) has learned that he manages his portfolio, and needs to have his own copies of any work clips he wants to use!
>>asked whether he believed he would have gotten his job back without SAG-AFTRA involvement, Sleiman said, “No. No, I would have been screwed completely, because Pennsylvania is an at-will state, so they could have just fired me and that would have been the end of it. The fact that it’s a union shop is actually the whole reason I was able to fight back at all.”
But what happens now? Won’t he just hate his job because he’s working in a place where he has made himself deeply unpopular?
I’m intrigued how the situation is ordinarily resolved. Does he tough it out? Do the managers get fired? Does the company settle privately to make it all go away?
"They tried their best. They called me every name in the book. They cut off my health insurance. They deleted all of my fucking stories, which like, what the fuck? And then they still lost. People keep asking, ‘Is it going to be weird going back?’ I’m like, yeah, for them.”"
I rather think it will be super weird for everyone.
Also the original joke, that was likely the one triggering the firing, was about his workplace:
“I work at one of these places that’s so woke it’s kinda racist,” the joke reads in part. “Like this lady asked my boss, she’s like ‘Yo, does Jad consider himself a person of color?’ because she was making a list of us. Fucking hell? Sick, alright. I get to be in this lady’s brown dude Pokédex.”
Bring back common sense.
Aim for uncommon sense instead.
Incidentally, if anyone dares to call me that (I'm Japanese), I sincerely will not consider him a man of good character.
Dr. King preferred "citizens of color." What sets "people of color" apart? Both acknowledge the subject's humanity.
Woke, in this case, is focusing on Nth order effects.. do prod your coworker about their race because abstract reasons justified by theories about social abstractions... Thinking about group effects that might kick in at the societal level instead of the effect you're having immediately on the individual sitting right in front of you.
The former, first order common sense thinking, is what normal people intuitively do. Focusing on the individual when dealing with an individual is the common sense approach. The second, focusing about abstract secondary group effects when dealing with an individual, is something people get trained into doing by sociology class in university, or being lectured on the internet, or being indoctrinated into a racist ideology. A traditional racist or a modern woke person doesn't see individuals, they see representatives of abstract groups that must be treated in some way calculated to have Nth order group effects.
And was offended by that that.
They should just tell the offended individual that if they get MS or a different serious disease (and, with MS, usually disability) they get to have special treatment.
Until then: STFU.
People are assholes.
Not sure it would have helped in his case as both his job and hobby are public. But it has kept drama at bay in my case and has served me well but ymmv.
I believe the intention is to say “it’s ok to be out as gay/trans/whatever, or to express your culture through dress/hair/etc.”. But we have a sloganized sentiment that opens the door for a lot more than that.
Australia has much better legal protections for workers though.
I also find that lunch and coffee are great ice breakers - otherwise an office can feel quite sterile and disconnected.
There are a few coworkers who come in to the coworking space with me and we talk about all kinds of things and get to know each other really well. No one does this on Teams/Slack. Not being able to assess the vibe of the room and having everything permanently logged just kills any personality.
-- Erich Fromm, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu-7UDT0Xe4&t=94s
On the other hand, if we can all present our workplace self, we can get our work done, and then go home and be our whole selves at home where our incompatabilities don't clash.
If it's an autobiography, I can see how he'd be difficult to work with.
The problem with people who think they are writing in Hunter Thompson / Gonzo Journalism mode, is that most of them are bad at it, and none of them are Hunter Thompson.
Hunter Thompson never sought out a straight job.
a leader wrote a book esposing ideals that were dated and frankly ‘designed to upset’
to quote:
“” soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. “”
if you had a boss that calimed all people that looked like you were shit, how would you feel reporting to them?
Life isn't fair. But we as a society do what we can to make life more fair. And I personally believe that it's more fair to ensure people aren't forced to choose between expressing their half-decent opinion, shitty jobs, and homelessness/emergency-only medical care/low-quality food/whatever else you would probably deem "essential", than it is to ensure bosses can hire and fire whoever they want for whatever reason. You can disagree, but I think most people do agree, considering most people are also working jobs and would be in danger of losing their essentials if they were fired (as apparently 62% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck).
There are other solutions too. I think if we had UBI, or just better unemployment and an economy which guarantees you a decent job provided you can do decent work, unions and employee protections wouldn't matter. But currently it seems like those reforms are far away, while unions and employee protections exist right now.
We use a bit of asymmetrical freedom here in the US; we don't FORCE anyone to stay, but we don't allow you to bar people from being present without a good reason. And in general, "at will" employment is the norm and this is a special case; it's only when a company shows that it is incapable of being reasonable when stuff like this happens.
They forfeited the control over their employment by being irresponsible, by being incredibly unprofessional, by holding employees to personal standards outside of professional bounds. They stopped acting like an employer, so they lost the benefits that come with that status.
A company isn't just a bunch of people who want to work with each other, unless it's structured as a worker owned coop, partnership, or similar. More often than not it's a legal institution created for the express purpose of extracting profit by extracting value out of poorer people's labor. There's no inherent "freedom" for any such entity, only what society chooses to give it.
Some laws are meant to bring fairness at a time of egregious unfairness. But don’t need to be laws forever. That doesn’t mean the problem will inevitably return without enforcement.
Someone isn't fired via democratic fiat of the entire "company" organism.
Agreed. The worst one – "they cut off my health insurance same day" – is pretty unique to the USA in particular. I wonder what it would take for the citizens of USA to get rid of the concept of employer-based health insurance, and replacing it with socialised healthcare.
Are they? Looking at the polls[1], it's not really clear either way. For instance much more republicans think that "the state of moral values" is a "big problem", which seems to suggest they're "more interested in culture wars", but at the same time for "racism" the numbers are flipped.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/06/21/inflation-he...
But as a first approximation, it would still certainly be an improvement to untangle the employers from the health insurance. And have people buy health insurance privately for a couple of decades and then with the experience of that in hand improve things further. Not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good an all that.
Organizing is the only protection a worker has against unilateral actions by an employer.
This guy is a reporter, so his public persona is an integral part of his job. And not "every aspect", only aspects in which he's performing in public.
There's a pretty easy correlate for this to understand why it's bad:
Let's say a company discovers that you are gay, and fires you based on some sort of "morality" clause.
Cool?
Why not? From many common perspectives globally, being gay is far more morally incorrect than making a joke about "wokeness".
Many organized religious and even non-religious worldviews have strict strictures against being a homosexual, all over the world.
Conversely, the morality that someone shouldn't say anything at any time ever that isn't completely neutral is siloed to a small band of weirdos.
So not only was he making bigoted and tasteless jokes, but some of them were revealing private business that should've been kept as internal matters. He betrayed the trust and confidentiality of his employer and his coworkers. That in itself is reprehensible, racism or not. Certainly, any employer who takes action against that sort of betrayal can be justified.
You've played your hand.
Gotta keep that close to the vest to be properly disingeneous.
I want it so one person could go to a pro-Israel rally and the other person to a pro-Palestinian rally and then come in to work and work side by side on a project with the utmost professionalism.
We need neutral zones in society otherwise our society will tear itself apart, as each side aims for a complete suppression of the other side.
That is, is it ever better to pretend we are more OK with something than we really are (for example, by saying nothing), than to speak our dissatisfaction plainly?
If you say yes, then you already accept "neutral zones" on some level -- that's what politeness is. If you say no, I'm interested to know how you avoid hurting the people in your life.
You call this hate filled divisive mutual nazi-calling "life"? Neutral zones disappearing is exactly what's causing society to tear itself apart.
And we could call it ‘Pretending everything is ok’.
How do you try to weave a social fabric with that?
(I'm not arguing that you should choose not to think about it -- only that it's certainly possible to do so.)
> How do you try to weave a social fabric with that?
How do you do it without it? The only solution given your rules is "if everyone just thought exactly like me and had exactly my values, then everything would be fine", which is a very childish view.
Why is it a detrimental 'rule' to exclude those that would punish someones nature capriciously with legislation and policy? Feels like the right path given the intolerance paradox.
That's the real problem we are facing. Too many people believing they represent the "morally correct" side due to the impact of social networks.
If you eliminate terms like "medicare for all" or "socialized medicine" and just ask people if they believe someone's access to care should be limited based on their financial situation, most people would say no. We often agree on the crux of the issue, but disagree on the mechanics of how to get there. But when we try to force people into binary solutions it's either "the people for socialized medicine" or "the people against socialized medicine" and that's a guaranteed downward spiral.
No it can't.
It can be equally applied when it comes perhaps to things where there is a choice, gun ownership, abortion, and such.
But show me one area where the Democrats want to make someone "lesser" or "diminished" for who they are - the things they cannot change. Gender. Sexual orientation.
> misogynistic information
stuff like "the vast majority of workplace deaths are men" and "women in fact aren't the primary victims of war"?
As long as we keep reacting to the thing being said immediately giving for granted that the other person actually wanted to say something else (even when that's true) we fall in that trap and communication is impossible.
It would be much more productive to just defuse all those superficial shibboleth traps and just agree on the obvious superficial facts and encourage the interlocutor to actually get to the bottom of their argument and spell it out what they actually want to say. "Do you want to say that women are playing the victim too much because men are dying more on the workplace? Do you want women to get back in the kitchen as they used to be? Then, just say it". If they're not saying that, who cares if they are "dog whistling" those ideas. The dog whistle works only if we all allow it to work by feeding the trolls.
Misinformation was one thing, they are complaining about regular old information now.
It’s also a pretty unkind thing to do in general.
As for whether this take is true, I’d check to see if FIRE already has this case on their radar. It’s my understanding that, as a free speech absolutionist organization, they frequently represent cases like these.
I don’t agree with a company firing you for having a side job, nor do I currently believe that this guys jokes are coming from an actual place of racism, but it’s pretty clear from the arbitrators statement that they’re one of “those” people.
The definitions of racism and sexism are not expanding.
Half-agree. Society at large's tolerance for racism and sexism has gone way down, particularly among young people, which is what most "older" people experience as "expanding definitions" - the 1945-born generations for example grew up in a time where it was completely normal to openly discriminate against Black people [1] or women [2], so they see that change as a threat to how they grew up, they see the criticism from young people as a direct offense against them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks#Parks_arrest_and_bu...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/when-could-women-open...