Hey, we were just discussing censorship! From the Huffington Post:
Patricia Jannuzzi, a religion teacher at Somerville’s Immaculata High School, made headlines last week after she argued that gays “want to reengineer western civ (sic) into a slow extinction” as part of their “agenda” in a post on her now-deleted Facebook profile, MyCentralJersey reported.
“We need healthy families with a mother and a father for the sake of the children and humanity!!!!!” she wrote alongside a Young Conservatives article about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights advocate Dan Savage urging Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson to prove that homosexuality is a choice.
After Jannuzzi’s remarks sparked a media firestorm, school officials reportedly placed her on administrative leave and forced her to deactivate her Facebook page, arguing in a March 13 letter to parents that the comments had been “completely inconsistent with our policy and position as a Catholic Christian community.”
Meanwhile, an online petition arguing against Jannuzzi’s statements had drawn over 1,000 signatures at the time this story was first published.
A screencap from her now-deleted Facebook page:
From NJ.com:
In a statement provided to NJ Advance Media, the school said it took “immediate action” and “mandated that the teacher involved permanently de-active her Facebook page.”
“The opinions reflected in these posts do not in any way represent the philosophy, mission or student experience of this high school,” the statement said. “… Through our investigation, we have determined that the information posted on this social media page has not been reflected in the curriculum content of the classes she teaches.”
Januzzi’s Facebook page, which was public at one point, was removed Wednesday morning.
Actress Susan Sarandon (whose nephew went to that high school and was a student of Jannuzzi’s) posted about it on her Facebook page, as did some reality show celebrity I’ve never heard of.
A few thoughts:
1) Obviously, Jannuzzi’s thoughts are homophobic, ignorant, and suggests that she could do a lot to improve as a person.
2) Let’s not forget that the Catholic Church’s official position on gays – “objectively disordered” – is also disgusting, homophobic, and wrong. What they are objecting to is not homophobia, but crudely-stated homophobia.
3) But, according to the school, the kind of thinking she posts on her Facebook page isn’t reflected in her teaching. So it’s really shouldn’t be any of the school’s business.
4) “…the school said it took ‘immediate action’ and ‘mandated that the teacher involved permanently de-active her Facebook page.'” Now that’s censorship. “Mandated.”
5) From the left or the right, this sort of intrusive attack on employee’s freedom by bosses should scare us all to death. Apparently the people who run Immaculata High School don’t understand that just because you give someone a paycheck doesn’t give you a moral right to control what your employees think or write outside of work.
Because you’re an employee doesn’t (or shouldn’t) make you a serf. And the fact that we depend on our jobs to pay our rent (or mortgage) and eat makes a boss “mandating” what we say inherently coercive. This is disgusting. In a country that really valued free speech, there’d be an enormous wave of revulsion every time a boss acts this way/
6) That Change.org petition has a little over a thousand signatures as of Thursday evening. A little over a thousand signatures is really not many signatures at all, especially for a story that’s gotten so much coverage. That the school engaged in censorship based on a tiny Change.org petition indicates that the school administrators are either spineless cowards, or they were eager for an excuse.
7) Incidentally, the Change.org petition originally seemed to be leaning for calling for censorship – the title of the petition, shamefully, is “Stop Public Hate Speech of Teachers” – but more recent edits and updates have veered away from calling for either censorship or for firing the teacher, instead asking for sensitivity training.
8) Susan Sarandon should know better than to criticize an ordinary, non-celeb citizen by name. Talk about punching down! I really like Sarandon generally, but in this case she’s been incredibly thoughtless at best and a bully at worse.
9) Although I’m not a fan of either the petition-writer’s acts or Sarandon’s, in the end I think it is the School that deserves big heaping piles of scorn for this. They should have the guts to stand up for free speech by criticizing their employee’s statements without suspending her or making her take down the Facebook page; instead, they’ve shown they have no respect at all for free speech or for the basic human rights of their employees.
Agreed.
The employer is the most immediately present and coercive authority most of us interact with on a daily basis. Freedom of speech that does not account for protection from that authority that is not freedom of speech at all.
—Myca
I’m too lazy to look this up to verify, but I do believe that Catholic schools have been arguing for some time that teachers are a ministerial position, and therefore not covered by discrimination law. Other religious schools have certainly made this argument. As the point of the ministerial exception is to permit religious entities to police the religious values of their religious personnel, it would presumably be permissible to police their off the job speech. I mean, if a religious institution can fire a ministerial employee for being gay, which they absolutely can and which they must be able to do if religious freedom is to have real meaning, I can’t see how they wouldn’t be able to fire a ministerial employee for homophobia.
And if any teacher is ministerial, presumably a theology teacher is.
The societal bargain we’ve made with religion is that we permit religion to be evil, as long as it is is only evil to it’s own members. A huge number of the rights we take for granted have no applicability in the religious context, which is governed by a certain “buyer beware, you get what you deserve” ethic for religious practitioners.
There’s probably nothing we can do about that, either- it’s not like religions are going to permit themselves to be policed in the way the rest of society is policed. And they’re obviously not going to stop holding counter cultural values. That’s what they’re FOR.
I don’t like the idea of employers policing your off the job conduct. But I wouldn’t choose a theology teacher at a religious school as my test case if I wanted to make good law. She’s practically the paradigmatic example of someone who has no rights in this regard, and any attempt at extending her rights hits up against some pretty big structural issues regarding religious freedom.
Interesting points, Patrick.
If I were an administrator at this school I’d be more embarassed at the total lack of grammar, spelling ability, and reasoning ability displayed in this teacher’s comment.
They should have just fired her sorry ass.
She has every right to say hateful, disgusting things on facebook. She can be a Nazi and a racist and a homophobe. But the school has no obligation to allow her to have contact with its students.
Well, that’s not actually censorship under your other definition, I don’t think.
First, the results (“go find somewhere else to work”) are something which is perfectly legal for them to do otherwise, since it’s probably an at will employee. and the action (“fire someone for reasons unrelated to their status in a protected class”) is perfectly legal, so their actions aren’t illegally coercive. Unless you use ‘coercive” as your “just because” substitute (and I know how you feel about at-will employment…) then that doesn’t seem right.
Second, it doesn’t prevent the publication or republication of the views.
Third, it’s not even necessarily inappropriate under many analyses, because some employers have a lot of interest in how they are perceived–and moralistic employers are probably near the top of that list, as Patrick notes. (I run a small business which relies on customer good will and which appeals to a lot of people from a diverse background. If one of my employees decided to make public racist or anti-gay statements to the degree where someone said “hey, do you know that your paralegal is a gay-hating racist?” I would fire her.)
Fourth, it makes no sense to support “sensitivity training” since that is, in many cases, merely a way of imposing thought controls or speech controls through other means. To the degree that folks want to maintain a “free speech for all, no firing, no controls” approach, they shouldn’t try to slip out of it by having “mandatory sensitivity training” which tries to accomplish the same thing. Your employees can say what they want, or not. They can have consequences, or not.
Fifth, you say
That incorrectly conflates “think” and “write.”
Outside “sensitivity training” and the like, we mostly focus on what people do. If you’re a secret Nazi sympathizer who is a nice and wonderful person in public, you get credit for your actions; if you’re actually nice and march with the Nazis you get the shaft.
And of course most employers DON’T actually control what their employees write (and not at all what they think.) Some may attempt to control what their employees choose to publicize to others, though. (We’re still working out the whole “what you say to a single person can become a national news story” problem of publication. I think it’s a huge issue and I don’t know how to solve it.)
I assume that to you, there is no “good coercion.”
I note that OTHER, “more deserving,” folks may need that job to pay THEIR rent and mortgage. But they don’t get a chance. Would you want to deny them a chance to get benefit from their good social choices? Would you want to remove the chance for them to get ahead through good deeds? How do you keep that incentive if you take away the consequences?
This seems contrary to your concept of social accountability that you are often promoting. It also seems contrary to the general concept of free speech: if there is a social decision that public statements of ___ are good, then why should employers be prevented from rewarding people with good social manners? This is a zero-sum game: rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior are pretty much the same thing. If you think it’s good for people to selectively hire based on qualities of ‘equity and acceptance’ in the teaching profession, then you need to be OK with people having bad consequences when they DON’T demonstrate those qualities.
You’re very black and white, it seems.
This is a conflict of interests, not a one sided issue. The employer has its own right of association, and its own right of action, and its own rights of speech. Firing the employee is an exercise of those rights.
It is, of course, also censorship, because the employer is choosing to restrict the speech rather than counter it with more speech. And of course, it is also directly opposed to the free speech rights of the employee.
I’m wondering why that post was public to begin with. Everyone that I know who teaches has heard stories like this before (well, not exactly this, but things related to social media) and is really careful with privacy controls. That doesn’t solve the problem of “What if one of your friends decides to publicize something you posted friends-only?” but it does at least make it so that you’ve got some semblance of “This is a private conversation.”
Also, as for this being a religious school, I know that religious colleges and universities are allowed to discriminate based on religion. As I’ve been looking for a new job, I keep getting annoyed why I see a job ad and the job looks perfect for me, and then I get to the list of qualifications at the bottom and it includes Statement of Christian Faith. (Not sure why, but there was a period of a few weeks where it seemed like nearly half of the ads posted included that, so it was getting frustrating.)
Hmm. From a legal perspective (tempered by the fact that I’m not a lawyer and may be misunderstanding the relevant law) it seems like the school can fire the teacher, but whether it should is a different matter. I don’t like what that teacher said. But I don’t want a norm of bosses interfering in employees’ off-the-job political speech that doesn’t interfere with their ability to do their job (even if legally, private sector bosses can). There’s the principle of the thing, and also the fact that I know people with politics much more like my own who have been bitten in the ass by this, and it’s something that I have personal concerns about.
To me, since this teacher is a front-line employee it’s clearly different ethically from something similar happening to an executive, because when we’re talking “culture of free speech” issues rather than “First Amendment free speech” issues, I care about that kind of power differential.
Amp,
You mention at the end of your post:
Can you clarify, which basic human rights are you referring to? It seems like you’re saying the school violated some right of hers in addition to free speech. Are you of the opinion that she has a right to her job? Some people do believe that, and I’m curious what your position is.
Moving on.
I’m not scared to death. What I am is torn.
See, I can easily come up with a hundred examples of off-duty free speech that I don’t think deserve firing, and that would anger me if I saw that happen to someone. I can ALSO easily come up with a hundred examples of off-duty free speech that (if I were an employer) would result in me firing the person or refusing to hire them.
For example, if I were running a private school* and I found that one of my teachers had written a post under her own name, explicitly calling for an end to age of consent laws in the U.S., I would not hesitate to fire her. For one, I think the proposal is disgusting – even though it’s unambiguously free speech!! – and that posting it under her own name shows extremely bad judgment. For another, once it becomes public knowledge of what she’s written, I would expect to be inundated with calls from parents threatening to pull their kids from school unless she was removed. I would expect the reputation of the school to take a major hit based on association with her, due to her speech. I would have fears about whether the students at the school were genuinely safe with her. I would think I had a responsibility to the students and to the school to remove her. I would probably fire her even if her speech never became widely publicized.
Now you may respond by saying that my example is egregious. I agree, which is why I picked it. If you’re a free speech advocate (and I consider myself one), I think you are committed to defending egregious speech against censorship just as much as popular speech. I’m just not persuaded that firing someone over speech is at all comparable to censorship.**
* I say private school in this example since it avoids getting bogged down in the issue of union contracts with public school teachers, which I acknowledge may limit the ability for administrators to unilaterally fire teachers.
** If you prefer a slightly less egregious example, the folks at Popehat had a few threads open regarding the firing of Pax Dickinson a couple of years ago based on his tweets. (https://www.popehat.com/2013/09/11/pax-dickinson-thought-crime-public-shaming-and-thick-liberty-in-the-internet-age/ and https://www.popehat.com/2013/09/10/speech-and-consequences/) Do you take the same position on free speech regarding Dickinson? Was Business Insider out of line from a free speech standpoint in firing him?
Amp,
The more that I think about this, the more confused that I am by the dichotomy in your responses to the teacher and the student in the other course.
The anti-gay teacher is statistically likely to be teaching, or interacting with, some gay kids. The teacher is in a position of authority; the kids have no choice in their teachers; the kids are minors.
The anti-rape-culture college student is known to be interacting with some assault survivors. He’s not in a position of authority; everyone has some choice in their class; nobody is a minor; the college is probably designed to encourage inquiry etc.
How do you conclude that it’s immoral (which is how you seem to be using “censorship”) to get rid of the teacher, but not immoral to get rid of the college student?
Or, to ask a different question: Imagine that the college student’s attitude and speech were coming from a non-tenured professor and that, like the college student, the professor refused to change his speech. Would that be better, somehow? If you would not want the professor to get fired or suffer “coercive censorship” (even though he has authority and responsibility that the students lack, and far more power over students,) how would you explain that?
This may not be the most facile thing that can be said about free speech issues, but it’s certainly close. Of course it’s a conflict of interests. So’s everything.
Unfortunately, I think it’s a little more complicated than that.
—Myca
Eh…it depends. First, what is the workplace written social media policy? (some employers expect certain employees to use social media as part of their professional presence). Does an employee clearly identify him- or herself as such-and-such title, at such-and-such workplace? Have any company logos or company photos on his- or her- social media site? Does the employee “friend” or “follow” or link to his or her coworkers, supervisors, official company sites? If so, then like it or not, what that person says comes into play when it comes to actionable offenses on hostile workplace claims—especially if the employee in question possesses any authority within the workplace hierarchy.
Second, what is the workplace nondiscriminatory policy that the employee signs on to as a condition of employment? What are the parameters or restrictions of said policy?
Third, there is such a thing as publicly-expressed opinions that call into question a person’s suitability for certain jobs. People who have strong prejudices cannot reasonably be trusted to treat those they are prejudiced against fairly. For jobs that require a lot of individual authority and little supervision, this is a time bomb waiting to go off.
So, whether or not this teacher was required to use social media as part of her job, or if she took it upon herself to identify herself by title and workplace, if she allowed her students or fellow employees to view her Facebook page, what parameters she had in terms of the workplace nondiscriminatory policy (what latitude she has for expressing personal opinions to students or fellow employees without edging into hostile workplace territory)—that all makes a difference.
That’s the claim they’re making. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. What are the gay and lesbian students saying? Or students with gay or lesbian parents? Are you suggesting that it is unreasonable for such students or parents to have lost confidence in this teacher’s ability to teach their children? And how many students have to pull out of the school before the school can reasonably say that this particular teacher’s Facebook is impacting their mission?
Here’s the EEOC on social media. Employers can expect that any discrimination claim made against them is going to also contain screenshot after screenshot of social media pages of their employees (especially those with authority) posting derogatory and/or discriminatory “jokes” or claims, along with “likes” and reblogs by other employees. Social media is merely making visible, to a broad spectrum of people, what was less visible before. Plausible deniability has been lost.
I would also say that it’s immoral and would be similarly appalled for a student to be disciplined for out-of-class political speech, and I’d support the teacher being fired for having said this in-class.
If we spend the vast majority of our waking hours at (or commuting to and from), work, it’s only decent for us to be allowed to be private citizens in the hours that remain, and part of being a private citizen is being able to voice your own political opinions, rather than having to either shut up or parrot your boss’s opinions out of fear of losing your job.
I’ve accepted that when you’re at work (and I’m counting the classroom, for both students and teachers) your employer can discipline you for the things you say. I don’t entirely like it (but I believe that a strong right to free speech is important, so it makes sense I wouldn’t like it), but I’ve accepted it.
—Myca
If you take the position that employers shouldn’t have the right to control free speech outside of working hours, then you have basically taken the position that there’s no conflict of interest with the employer’s speech rights. What rights are there to conflict with, if the employer has none?
I can see a view where you think both of them are wrong; where you think both are OK. But if you want to focus on one being substantially more wrong than the other as you have done here, I don’t think it’s really a speech issue so much as your views on worker’s rights.
IIRC, you take a very “patriarchal oversight” view about freedom of contract and freedom of employment, though I may be mixing you up with Amp: Do you think that people should be allowed to contract for non-minimum-wage work, and take on a high level of responsibility and control as part of that? Do you think that those contract shouldn’t be able to address public speech?
That’s an awfully silly thing to say.
I think there’s a conflict between the rights of the employer and the rights of the employee, and I resolve it by giving the employer’s rights precedence when the employee is in the workplace operating as an employee, and the employee’s rights precedence when he’s not.
—Myca
La Lubu- it’s a catholic school. Presumably the gay and lesbian students are closeted for reasons virtually identical to the reasons this teacher is in trouble.
That being said, the liability issue is valid.
Actually, as long as we’re talking about it, since you give the employer’s rights precedence in both cases, have you “basically taken the position that there’s no conflict of interest with” the employee’s speech rights, or that the employee has no free speech rights to conflict with?
The difference between our positions is that I believe that both of them have free speech rights, and that it’s important for both of them to be able to exercise their free speech.
Were an employee to sue their employer for their out-of-the-workplace support of Mitt Romney (say), I would want that case to be tossed out of court. So, I understand, would you.
Were an employer to fire their employee for their out-of-the-workplace support of Barack Obama (say), I would consider that wrongful termination. You, of course, would not.
That’s not competing interests. That’s not finding a balance. That’s denying employees their free speech rights.
I think that free speech is vital to our democracy, and that since nearly everyone in America has a job and an employer, giving employers veto power over the speech of their employees ends up potentially denying free speech to most Americans.
That is not a pro-free-speech position.
—Myca
Myca says:
March 20, 2015 at 11:44 am
Actually, as long as we’re talking about it, since you give the employer’s rights precedence in both cases, have you “basically taken the position that there’s no conflict of interest with” the employee’s speech rights, or that the employee has no free speech rights to conflict with?
The difference between our positions is that I believe that both of them have free speech rights, and that it’s important for both of them to be able to exercise their free speech.
Were an employee to sue their employer for their out-of-the-workplace support of Mitt Romney (say), I would want that case to be tossed out of court. So, I understand, would you.
[changed to avoid potential side track about interactions with the political/voting issue.]
No, I don’t think I would.
I don’t think it’s ideal. But I also think it’s rare because of the consequences. They may lose other employees who sympathize; they may get a rep as someone who sticks their nose in where it isn’t deserved; and so on. Most obviously they’ll have announced their allegiance to the “no death penalty” side so strongly that they had better hope there are sufficient customers who will shop there, or they’ll go under.
But in the end, who are you to tell me (or anyone else) what is important to US? I mean, shit: I just hired a new employee. On her first day, she came in smelling very very slightly of smoke. But I don’t care: I absolutely positively detest smoke. At ALL. The thought of smelling smoke meant that I had a “look, you didn’t do this for your interview but this is going to be a problem” conversation, which turned out to be a small and simple solutoin.
Someone else might not have cared.
An “objective analysis” would have told me to suck it up.
But screw that: this is my business, and my money, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay it to someone who I don’t like working with.
Of course it is. It balances freedom of association. Free speech has never been free: it always carried costs of association. And the associative costs for employers are unusually high w/r/t employees, because (a) they serve customers; (b) they represent your business; and most obviously (c) YOU have to pay THEM, which is a straight-up cost. It’s actually much higher than most associative costs.
So … when I say that both the employer and the employee ought to be able to engage in out-of-office free speech without harassment on control by the other, that’s somehow taking the employees’s side and dismissing the rights of the employer.
When you say that the employer’s interests ought to win out both in and out of the office that’s weighing competing interests and finding a balance?
Suuuuure it is.
Look, you can favor whatever you like. You’re an employer. Of course you think employers ought to be able to tell their employees what not to say on the weekends and what political opinions to discuss. It’s the same way that I think the government should give huge subsidies to brown-haired roleplayers.
But don’t tun around and put on your “I <3 Free Speech" button like the rest of us are big censoring jerks, and maybe slow your roll on the whole "Gosh the left sure LUUUUUVS censorship" thing.
I'm in favor of people I hate being able to say things I hate in their private lives without being fired from their jobs.
You are not.
—Myca
Smelling of smoke at work is a thing she is doing at work, and one that it is reasonable for the employer to have a hand in.
—Myca
Myca- you’re just never going to get lawyers to agree with you on this without massive caveats. Our entire profession is built around norms that do not separate private speech from professional behavior, and those norms exist for valid reasons.
I genuinely envy people who work in professions where they can hold political opinions without affecting their employers. But from where I sit, it seems like discussing social norms in Japan. So far away that I can’t quite even imagine what it must be like to live there.
Myca @ 19:
Could not the same thing be said about you? From what I gather (from past comments you have made), you are an employee. Of course you think employees should not be told what to say.
For me, I post under a pseudonym for a reason. My personal views do not reflect my professional duties. I do not endorse crime, but I defend criminals. I use the phrase, “illegal aliens,” though 60 percent of my clientele do or have fit that description. Even if I think 100 percent of them should be deported, I have no problem fighting for whatever rights they have. Even if I do not believe in gay marriage, same sex marriage, or marriage equality, or whatever they want to call it, if a same sex couple wants an estate plan from me, I will give it to them (it is legal here); their money spends just as well as any other. If they want a divorce however, they can look elsewhere. Not because I was raised Catholic, but because I don’t want to deal with the emotional mud-slinging. Besides, when a German, an Irishman, and a Polack start a law firm (yes, he is from Poland, and they actually call themselves Polacks over there (maybe it is like an N-word thing)), it does sound like the opening of a racist joke. So, yes, as employers, we certainly have a liberal concept of free speech. However, our new employee, an American of Mexican lineage, was aghast when one of us remarked that Mexicans don’t read (we were discussing print advertising, versus radio, versus TV). Of course, the Ecuadoran in our office was amused; they don’t like Mexicans (though she does not care much for Ecuadorans either, come to think of it). We trust our employees to distinguish between spirited debate (my partner and I butt heads a lot, to their great amusement) and a discriminatory environment. It takes an open minded person to work here, primarily because we are free to say whatever we want, without worries (so long as our public face is directed to our clients’ interests).
-Jut
Then have a carve-out for attorneys. Most people are not attorneys and most people do not work in law firms.
Also, most people are not employers, which is another reason to privilege the free-speech rights of employees. If you have to pick a class to privilege, pick the one that does more good, vis-a-vis free speech.
—Myca
Well, no, because I’m not arguing that the employee’s rights ought to be primary in every situation. My proposal is a balanced one, in which the employer has control during the times of employment, and the employee is able to exercise their right to free speech without interference outside the times of employment.
A view lopsided towards the employee would be if I was to say that the employee’s right to free speech ought to trump the rights of the employer in all situations. You know … like Gin & Whiskey is claiming, only the other way around.
Or if I was to flip it even farther and say that an employer expressing a political view hostile to the employee, even outside the workplace, ought to be grounds for a harassment suit or some shit.
Of course I’m not saying that. I’m saying that there are competing rights, and that “fuck employees, their rights don’t count” isn’t a reasonable balance, no matter how much the employer class wants to pretend it is.
—Myca
Myca,
Slight change in topic, which may kind of pull some threads from various posts together.
If I recall, you are a paralegal (or work in a law firm). Ethically, lawyers are required to make sure their staff (paralegals and legal assistants) don’t give legal advice. Censorship? Good or bad? G&W would likely say it is good censorship (as would you, I suspect, by the way). Amp? I am not sure. He should, but, as g&w suggests, it appears he looks at “censorship” as “bad.”
-Jut
I’m not sure I’d call it censorship (I might), but no, I don’t object to it.
I think whether it’s censorship is related to whether you’d consider “don’t shout fire in a crowded movie theatre” to be censorship or not.
—Myca
Myca,
Between you and me, I HATE the “shouting fire in a crowded theater” example.
This is not the 1920’s. We have sprinklers now. Fires are not that bad these days. Fire exits are better. And people are lazier and more complacent. If I yelled fire in a crowded theater tomorrow, the likely response would be “shut up and sit down, I needs to see me my Ultron preview!”
Tl;dr: SCOTUS be damned, I have a right to yell “Fire” in a crowded theater (and especially at a Great White concert). THAT example is antiquated.
-Jut
What bugs me is that people always leave out the essential word “falsely.” (I’m not meaning to pick on Myca, because everyone does this). It should be “there’s no first amendment right to FALSELY yell fire in a crowded theater.” Yelling it when the theater actually is on fire us another matter.
It’s a good principle, but also an illustration of how good principles can be misapplied by people with a political bias – the ruling it comes from, was one in which the Supreme Court said (iirc) that it’s legitimate to arrest someone for peacefully giving out anti-war pamphlets.
Jut, that’s a fair point. I don’t know enough about paralegals to discuss that exact example, but I can certainly think of examples where a job can reasonably require some limitations on what a person says outside of work. If you work for the governor as her press representative, for instance, then the governor can quite rightly fire you if it turns out you use your social media accounts to argue that the Nazis had some good ideas, because in that case your off-job speech would make it impossible for you to perform your job duties well.
I guess my view is that there should be a strong-but-possible-to-overcome presumption against employers controlling employees offwork lives or speech. And the less well paid and prestigious the job (put another way, the more radical the power inbalance in favor of the employer), the more strongly we should resist the assumption that employers have a right to control offwork decisions.
Sure. That’s a fair point. What I was getting at, though, is whether, say, anti-fraud laws counts as censorship. I mean, that’s what UPL is, really.
Or laws about passing bad checks. After all, we are telling people that they are not allowed to write their name and a certain number on a slip of paper. Is that censorship?
To contradict what I wrote earlier, I do think there are examples of “good censorship.” Laws against slander or libel or fraud can be good (although they can also be misapplied), and are certainly a form of censorship. Laws against distributing child porn are good censorship.
I think that these examples don’t contradict the principle that censorship is a bad thing, however, just as the allowance for shooting another person in self-defense doesn’t contradict with the principle that shooting people is a bad thing. In both cases, the principle works out to “X is a bad thing we should avoid except when it’s necessary to prevent something even worse.”
(I don’t think writing checks is, in typical cases, “speech,” so I don’t think laws against passing bad checks are censorship. A bad check is no more speech than a forged $100 bill is speech.)
No, no, my point was more that, in California anyway, Unlicensed Practice of Law is illegal. It is a crime.
I’m not sure it counts as censorship for my boss to tell me “do not do this illegal thing that could come back on both of us.”
Or if it is censorship, it’s the legislature doing it, not my boss.
—Myca
Oh, I get it now!
I agree with this perspective, however I would add that the significance of the impact of offwork speech/conduct on the capacity to do the job is also relevant. Being the face of the local neo-nazi movement is unlikely to affect a job of someone doing data entry or flipping burgers. It might affect someone who works in front line retail-sales if it ends up putting off customers.
In this case we’re dealing with a teacher where the relationship between the teacher and students is vitally important to the teacher’s capacity to do their job. It’s a relationship that inherently extends beyond simple ‘work hours’. Saying things outside work has a much greater potential to affect that relationship than a relationship between normal work colleagues. This is even more pronounced given the specific role of the teacher within the context of a religous school. So I don’t see a huge problem with the restriction of speech in this particular case.
Putting the particulars of this case aside, I agree with this as a general principle.
To my mind, the nature of the employer is a huge issue in these cases. If it is the government (non-political appointments) or a corporation so large as to have the power of a small government entity, I fall on the side of free speech for the employee, providing it does not compromise their work. In some cases, I would even extend this into the work place (eg. union organizing, whistle blowing). For small businesses, meaning ones so small that the owner is working along side his/her employees (nod to G&W); and religious institutions engaged in minesterial work (nod to Patrick), I fall on the side of the employer, even with a lot of speech outside of the workplace.
I also think that the content of the speech matters. Supporting one side of a fairly mainstream division (eg. Democrat vs. Republican; pro-life vs. pro-choice; pro-death penatly vs. anti) should be more protected than extreme speech, such as participtation in hate groups (eg. KKK, Nazi Party). I think once a person’s membership in a hate group is known, that can’t help but create a hostile enviorment for members of the target group, and employers should have a lot more latitude to fire, even if they are large and non-religious.
For the case in question, I think the combination of probably ministerial religous work and speech at least on the edge between mainstream discourse and hate speech* makes me not alarmed by this particular firing.
*The fact that such hateful speech can also be a part of mainstream discourse shows how far we still have to go in the battle for rights for LGBT people.
It wasn’t even all that crudely stated. I’m honestly surprised that a comment like this got her in trouble with a Catholic school at all. The whole “families need a mother and a father” thing is part of their actual teaching on the subject. The only place she diverges from official Catholic position is the conspiracy theory nonsense about wanting everyone to be gay and drive western civilization to extinction.
Having been a teacher, I’m not sure I agree with this. As others pointed out, she probably has gay students. If she posted publicly, her students might well have seen it, even before the petition and firestorm. Granted, as gay kids at a Catholic school, I doubt any of them would be shocked by her position, but it can still be a heck of a blow for a kid to hear that sort of thing from a teacher, especially if they looked up to her. And one of the *huge* risk factors for gay kids is a home and school environment that rejects them. So, yeah, I would say that her public statements that are about some of her students, even if she doesn’t make that connection herself, impacts her effectiveness as a teacher.
What seems weird to me is that it doesn’t necessarily impact her effectiveness any *more* than the anti-gay doctrine the church already supports. It does strike me as hypocritical for a Catholic school to pick this as an issue to discipline someone over.
Yep, I agree with you here. Not just censorship of the specific speech, but forbidding her a Facebook presence *at all* is pretty draconian. If a teacher got into a heated exchange with a parent on the phone, I doubt the school would mandate that they disconnect their phone service.
In general I agree with you, but since 1) this does potentially affect the performance of her duties as a teacher and 2) private religious schools tend to have morality clauses where you agree that your private life *is* their business.
Definitely agree with this as a general statement, but again, I don’t know that it applies in this specific case.
The more I think about this, the more I’m not sure whether her being a teacher means that certain kinds of public speech, even outside the classroom, could make her unsuitable for teaching minors who might be LGBTQ. On one hand, I don’t like the idea of rank-and-file employees being fired for their politics, as I said in my initial comment. On the other, the nature of the teacher/student relationship, a different power dynamic, makes this different from (to use an example that someone brought up above) data entry, and I’m not sure whether the school is trustworthy when it says that this has never affected her classroom behavior. LGBTQ kids experiencing queerphobic/transphobic behavior from teachers is a huge problem and a major predictor of negative outcomes later (see also the National Transgender Discrimination Survey).
On the third hand, I know someone who was fired from a different job working with kids (city youth worker) after being arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest. I get that being arrested is getting into actions rather than words, but in this case, we’re talking actions to express a political viewpoint. I don’t like the idea that working with kids should universally be an exception to a principle (that is not legally enshrined but that I support) of not firing rank-and-file employees for out-of-work political opinions. I guess the distinction is whether the kids are being harmed if they hear the political opinions, which gets sticky.
As far as i can tell, you’re arguing for what amounts to a total ban on out of work conduct, though
Weighing competing interests generally doesn’t mean that both sides actually win a particular battle. Employees have a variety of rights which balance them in other areas. For example, they can quit; sue for triple damages; cause losses without recourse; etc etc. They can also complain about and discuss working conditions, make false or unsubstantiated reports which get the employer in trouble, and so on. These are great!
But the interesting thing is that we have restricted so many anti-employee actions that there really is very little that a typical employer can do other than to fire someone. You can’t dock pay; you can’t force them to take it down (without firing them,) you can’t do a lot of things. Even if they try to start the disciplinary process, that often prompts a defensive report to authorities to give rise to a retaliation suit: I would tell all my employee clients to do just that. And so on.
It seems odd but it’s true. As a practical matter, it has become very difficult for an employer to protect their interests through means other than firing someone:
“My salaried employee spent the week surfing porn and we just found out. Can we dock his pay?”
-Nope.
“Oh. Can we dock him for a week of vacation?”
-Nope.
“What can we do?”
-You can fire him.
“We don’t really want to fire him. He probably doesn’t want to be fired. But he cost us a lot of money and we think he owes us a week of unfair pay. Isn’t there some way to make him recoup that?”
-Nope.
It’s not that I’m an employer, it’s that I know what I’m talking about in this area. It’s an opinion based on expertise and knowledge.
The number of employer clients who I have taken on for defense from employee suits, over my entire legal career, is “zero.”
The number of employees in the last decade who I have ever personally had a problem with because they did this (or because they unionized, or posted on FB, or anything else that I argue about) is “zero.”
The number of times that any provision I am discussing has caused me a single problem as an attorney, and the likelihood that one of them ever will for the rest of my career, even if they applied in my state, is “zero.” (You may not know this, but I am small enough to be exempt from almost all state and federal employment laws other than minimum wage. For fewer than 5 people you can basically do whatever the fuck you want.)
I don’t mind that you disagree. I don’t mind that we have different philosophies. But it’s a dick move to keep suggesting–and you’ve done this before–that my choice of philosophy is based on some sort of personal status which I don’t actually have.
Sure I am.
I’m in favor of people saying whatever they want in their private lives, and I would think it was a bad thing if they were unreasonably fired, and I might boycott the store, or tell my friends, or so on. The fact that I (and most folks) feel this way is probably due to the fact that most employers don’t actually act unreasonably most of the time.
I’m not in favor of calling any of those employees’ speech illegal, or setting up any per se categories of speech which are exempt from the protections below.
I’m not in favor of reducing employee protections that we have now, which is to say I don’t oppose the right of the employee to claim that any speech firing is pretextual, discriminatory, etc.
I’m just not in favor of an employee being able to use the power of the law to deflect all of the collateral consequences which may come from their choice of speech and the decision to publicize it beyond their private lives. You are.
Assume that you know that Business A hires people who you absofuckinglutely detest, and who absofuckinglutely detest you (choose your own poison.) You may or may not meet one if you go to the store. You may not even know who it is. But you know that some of “those people” are there, preparing your food and sewing your seams. You know that if one of “those people” met you, or knew about you, they might treat you badly.
You also know that the competing shop, Business B, does not have any of those folks. Everyone at Business B is a opinion-matched version of you and your best friends. Everyone likes you. Nobody despises you.
Based on the whole stuff here, I’d expect that people would shop just as much at Business A.
Is that true?
I think it could very well create a hostile work environment for employees from groups that the neo-nazis target.
gin-and-whiskey,
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “the whole stuff here”, so I’ll assume you mean based on my comment. I’d agree that some people would may their business from A to B. However, that’s got nothing to do with how well the employee is doing their job in making burgers or whatever.
When it comes to a small business, the impact of a single employee on the prospects of a business may be quite significant. However, for a large corporation the impact is likely to be minimal. The reverse is true for the potential for the employer’s (or employer’s management’s) political views to practically supress the capacity for political speech within a community. So there is certainly an argument for smaller employers to have a freedom to fire employees who’s offwork conduct poses a material threat to finacial success of the business. However, for large employers I think there isn’t much of a case.
There are already limits on an employer’s capacity to discriminate against people based on religious grounds. The question is whether we as a community value the principles of freedom of speech enough to protect them from the power of larger employers, such as government or corporations, at the risk of creating a little more bureaucracy.
One could say the same thing about feminism, no?
If one was so completely lost to reason that one had trouble seeing the enormous differences between feminism and Nazism, then yes, one could say the same thing.
And other people’s comments.
OK. More on that later as you might expect :)
But of course, that’s not all of their job. It’s NEVER all of their job. Every single job in every single company carries the unwritten words “…so that i can make money and keep my customers coming through the door.” As some folks put it, that is why people are there.
OK. So do you agree that
1) A small business usually knows better than the employee what the problem is;
2) A small business may have different values and tolerances than the employee or the public; and
3) Those tolerances/values may cause them to suffer greater harm?
There are businesses who don’t care if the cook is hostile to gay people but who would live in terror that the cook would serve undercooked chicken. There re presumably also businesses who don’t fire their cooks for mistakes but who won’t tolerate discrimination. Do you think those differences are invalid or unimportant?
Sure. And this is why:
1) Large corporations are likely to do this to a smaller %age of their employees, since they don’t care and since it’s more expensive to deal with larger groups;
2) Large corporations are likely to be conflict-averse, and take higher risks when they take strong political stands by firing someone;
3) Large corporations have much more to lose in a monetary sense; size works both ways. Remember Justine Sacco? What do you think Justine cost them? How much do you think they spent dealing with it?
Let me phrase it differently: how much of a problem do you think that this actually is? I look on Facebook and a lot of what I see is a rant. And most of the folks ranting have a job. I don’t see some groundswell of people being fired for political beliefs that wasn’t there before. Do you?
Re people discussing the schools Catholicism as it relates to this employees views- I hail from a middle class suburban area that is plurality Catholic. Catholic schools are everywhere. Doctrinally, they are against homosexuality. Practically, their parishioners and students are more liberal than the population at large, and favor gay marriage at a noticeable rate.
The result is a sort of weird detente where officially being gay is opposed, but everyone makes a lot of Facebook posts about the church “moving in the right direction” whenever the pope says something positive about gay people. Blatantly pro gay attitudes expressed in particularly churchy contexts, particularly ones that suggest church endorsement, are religiously punished. Blatantly anti gay attitudes are similarly punished, generally using similarly religious terminology.
It’s all part of the dance people do when they want to be good people, in spite of their religion.
“It’s all part of the dance people do when they want to be good people, in spite of their religion.”
And this is part of what is problematic in the WWW fueled outrage community. I think it crosses over with the discussion of the Adria Richards ‘dongle’ overreaction (by everyone).
1) A lot of people find it easier to be meaner to people they don’t know.
This is one of the reasons why coming out has been so important for the LGBT movement.
2) We have lots of ways of dealing with people whom we know (and don’t really want to be mean to) but don’t totally accept. These norms are healthy examples of actual tolerance (though like all things can be unhealthy in certain manifestations).
3) We don’t have good norms for people we don’t totally accept on the internet. We seem to find it easier to just go off on people on the internet in ways that we would never do in person. I’m not sure why that is, but we probably will have to get new tolerance norms for it (or maybe try to apply more of the in person tolerance norms).
This is true of the relationship between the Catholic church and the laity on sexual matters more generally, particularly contraception, but also all manner of sexual activities which do not culminate in PIV sex and/or which take place outside the context of marriage.
So, for example, you have something like this:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/25/students-criticize-administrations-response-what-they-term-hate-speech-professor
Which, contractual tenure I think. But otherwise: No matter what you think of the post itself, it is probably safe to say that
1) publicity regarding this will result in some associational benefits or costs to Conn depending on your viewpoint;
2) Conn’s response is itself going to consume time for the school, and the responders will have difficulty walking the fine line between taking a stand and not; and similar to #1,
3) the school’s response (to the degree it takes a stand) will also probably satisfy fewer folks than not taking a stand at all.
Ampersand:
How is a banknote, forged or otherwise, not speech?
English banknotes famously bear the words “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of XXX pounds” That is surely speech. Whether it’s meaningful or not is another matter. How would the Bank of England honour that promise? Pay you your fiver back?
Similar promises with trivial variations in wording appear on notes issued by several Scottish banks. (Presumably this is also true of Northern Irish banknotes, though I do not have any to hand to check). There is one significant difference, in that these banks promise to pay in Sterling. In other words they are promising to exchange their note for a BoE one. That is unquestionably a meaningful promise. In what way is it not speech?
And if it is speech on a genuine note, in what way are the same words of a forged note not speech? is forged speech not speech?
I’m not sure if this question is serious or trolling, but I’ll treat it as serious:
It can technically be speech because someone is speaking. Nobody calls it speech in the contract context, though, and nobody treats it as speech from a legal perspective. That’s because the laws at issue have to do with the effect (did you promise or not? If so, what did you promise?) and the resulting action (did you break a promise?)
“Wordlessly handing me $100 in cash” and “writing me a check for $100” are the same thing if you’re trying to figure out whether or not you paid me.
In the unusual event that speech actually mattered in that context, legally speaking, then we would start bothering to delineate it.
It was 100 percent serious. I’m at a loss as to why you might think I was trolling.
You don’t appear to understand the point I was making. I was responding to Ampersand’s remark that, in his view “a bad check is no more speech than a forged $100 bill is speech”. The specific point I contested was whether the banknote itself was speech. That is different from the question of whether a person handing you the note is speaking. (When the postman puts letters through my door, he is not speaking. The letter are speech nevertheless.)
Responding specifically to this:
The laws at issue, in the context of what I was talking about, would be the laws prohibiting the forging of banknotes. I don’t agree that these laws concern themselves with whether or not you made a promise. They simply outlaw the practice.
A cheque, bad or otherwise is even more clearly speech than a Federal Reserve or BoE banknote, insofar as, the banknotes are just fiat money which don’t really promise anything, the wording on them notwithstanding. A cheque, however, is a written instruction to a bank to pay someone from a particular account. I repeat the question. How is that not speech?
Sure, it’s speech all the time if you use a particular technical definition that doesn’t match common or legal parlance. 99.9999% of the time the “speech aspects” of the check are entirely immaterial, or are so unimportant relative to the other issues surrounding the check that it is clearly a waste of time.
When I pay my electric bill by check, I’m not trying to say anything by it, I’m merely trying to use a check as an alternative to mailing cash. I’m using words (“speech,” by your definition) but my particular choice of words (“one dollar even” as opposed to “One and No/100 Dollars”) have basically no communicative value. That’s why nobody calls a normal check writing exchange an act of speech.
If I were to forge Obama’s signature on a $4 billion poster-size check made payable to “the government of Iraq,” and go wave it around at a rally, that would be treated differently.
Because you seem like a guy who is smart enough not to actually think that you can raise a free speech defense to forging a check, and who is smart enough not to actually think that Amp literally meant that writing a check “was not speech.”
gin-and-whiskey wrote:
I’m curious about this. Admittedly, my understanding of employment law comes from reading Ask a Manager, which only touches briefly on legal issues and admits that every state is different, particularly California. But my understanding is that vacation is a benefit offered solely at the employer’s discretion. Since it’s pay received for no work, I thought it could be rescinded at any point (assuming you’re not singling out protected classes or going against agreements made in a contract or a company handbook). Is that not the case?
As far as docking pay, you can’t dock someone’s pay retroactively or expect them to show up at work for free, because that’s theft of labor, but you can certainly send them home for a week of unpaid leave, can’t you? Heck, for that matter, you can reduce their pay rate from that point forward if you want to. Also, if you give out bonuses, Mr. Porn-Surfer is presumably not getting one.
Talk about
moral hazardperverse incentives! If employers were allowed to “punish” workers by making them work for a week unpaid, that would create a very strong incentive for employers to utilize this punishment as often as they can possibly get away with it.There are many, many ways employers can punish employees. What you’re asking for is a way that employers can turn a profit off of punishing employees. That’s not legal, and it’s not legal for a very good reason. Why not just make it legal for employers to beat up employees and steal cash from their wallets, while you’re at it?
There are also a lot of remedies available to an employer other than “fire him” and “steal his pay”. As g&w is likely all too familiar with, though, employers are not always diligent about having clear disciplinary policies, much less meticulously documenting and following those policies, so that Porn Surfing Dude could have been reprimanded or put on a performance improvement plan. (And, as faithful readers of Ask A Manager know, having workplace policies and requirements means squat if a company is ultimately unwilling to get rid of employees who disobey them.)
KellyK,
In Mass., vacation is a wage once it has been “earned.” You can’t unilaterally take away accrued vacation any more than you can unilaterally take away earned wages UNLESS you have a very well drafted “use it or lose it” policy AND the vacation accrued under that policy.
Right.
Of course, one might ask whether an employee who sneaks out into the hall to FB for an hour is also committing “theft of services,” and–if so–whether it would still be “theft of labor” to ask them to stay late. Right?
Sure, in theory, though I fail to see what that gets you. You don’t pay them; they don’t work for you; you’re still out a week of pay for no benefit.
Yes, although that is a proactive fix. You only get “repaid” if they continue to work at the reduced rate, delivering the same value as they would for the higher rate. Otherwise you’re out a week of pay for no benefit.
Yup. That is why it is–and should be–illegal. In the balance it is better that way. But it does have its own moral hazards, right?
In my state it’s called the “special contracts” clause: NOTHING can prevent an employee from retroactively asserting any one of their rights. Even if they signed in blood in front of a notary. Even if they contracted for it.
This is true even if the employee got the better side of the bargain:
“I want to pay you $20/hour, but I don’t feel like tracking your hours. You’ll occasionally work over 40 hours, but I never want you to work more than 45. Including OT, the most you’d ever earn is 47.5 hours (if you worked 45 hours). How ’bout if I just salary you at 50 hours to be safe, i.e. $1000/week, and you promise never to exceed 45 hours? If you get to 47 hours let me know, I’ll need to pay you more.”
or
“OK, I’ll pay you as a 1099 contractor if you want, so you can do your own deductions. Since I’m not paying taxes or OT, I’ll be happy to pay you $30/hour instead of $20/hour.”
Such employees can STILL bring a lawsuit for misclassification. And they do. And they win.
The misclassified salaried employee will be able to get OT for all hours above 40–at the base rate of $25/hour, calculated off their salary of $1000/week, NOT off the rate that everyone thought was being paid, of $20/hour. And the misclassified contractor can get OT at the base rate of $30, plus employer tax contributions.
These laws are necessary. And even an unfair outcome serves as an added incentive for employer compliance. But they provide plenty of moral hazard of their own. As hopefully is clear.
No, actually, there often aren’t all that many ways. That’s my point.
Huh?
I’m not asking for a change. I’m just pointing out that it is a bit silly to set up an employee-rights-friendly set of laws which preclude a lot of what would otherwise be considered normal behavior (like docking someone who was blowing off work for a week), and then to complain when employers take the remaining few options (like firing him instead.) Firing is an expected consequences of the strict laws.
We also have very strict security deposit and tenant laws up here. Those are also good. Those also have collateral consequences: some of the tenants who might want to make a perfectly rational bargain (“I know I have bad credit and a sketchy history but I’ll pay an extra two months in advance”) cannot do so, so they can’t get a rental at all. Same thing.
“Turn a profit” isn’t actually what I said, nor the example I gave.
If you find out that your assistant spent 8 hours reading Facebook instead of working, you’d be out eight hours of “pay for work”. That isn’t profit, it’s a loss.
If you could figure out how to avoid that loss–for example, if you didn’t pay them for the 8 hours even though they were clocked in–that still wouldn’t be profit, it would be a neutral outcome.
There are all sorts of reasons why allowing you to dock your employee’s pay “just because you want to” is a bad idea, but the example had nothing to do with profit.
WFH? Are you sure you actually read my post?
g&w:
WFH?
Working From Home?
WTF!
-Jut
Sure. So, are you saying that in Massachusetts, that employee has to be paid for the hour they spent on Facebook? I don’t think it should be illegal for an employer to not pay someone for hours they spent *not* working, assuming they follow existing rules regarding salary. But, is it? That is, is the employer not allowed to dock the employee’s pay or make them take vacation *at all* or they only not allowed to dock a whole week because the salaried employee presumably did *some* work each day? If the employer documents that he was watching porn for six hours a day, they still have to pay for those six hours and can’t make the employee use vacation to cover them?
I think I misread your original post and was thinking you were talking about *punishment* rather than recouping the wages you paid for no work. But, since the employee is salaried, you can always assign them extra work for no extra pay until you feel that you’ve been paid back. You could do that in conjunction with the unpaid week if you want. Basically they come back with twice as much work to do because the only parts of their job that were done in their absence were the critical ones, and for everything someone took off their plate, they’ve been assigned something from someone else.
So, even if you *do* have to pay them for time they spent not working (which seems very strange to me), there are still ways you can try to recoup the loss. Yes, they depend on the employee continuing to work for you, but if you didn’t want them to continue working for you, you’d just fire them.
Yes.
I have been on the phone for the last hour. I don’t know what my paralegal is doing.
I owe her the full pay for that hour, whether she was picking her nose and reading economics journals, or whether she was diligently researching employee rights.
If I found out at the end of the day that she was an expert on Greek economics but didn’t know the law, I could fire her. I could NOT, however, dock her wages.
This is OK on balance because the outcomes from “I can dock her wages” are worse. But it doesn’t mean that there is no harm.
That happens a lot in employment:
The minimum wage protects people from exploitation. On balance, the minimum wage is a good thing. The minimum wage also prevents a lot of economically rational and desirable transactions. Even if I was willing to take on a law school intern and provide them with $10,000 of training value in exchange for a few coffee runs and some copying; or even if I was willing to hire my neighboring 9 year old to wash my windows, we can’t agree to it. The benefits outweigh the costs but there are costs.
To illustrate how this can get messy, you should realize that many employment claims result from an agreement which was initiated by the EMPLOYEE. It can be really hard to find someone who will work as a W-2 employee and lose their taxes, rather than getting a 1099 or getting cash under the table.
If Option A is “Get a 1099 with no deductions, work for $30/hour, pay your own worker’s comp, and lose your entitlement to time-and-a-half”
and Option B is “Get a W-2 with federal and state taxes deducted; work for $20/hour, get worker’s comp, and get time and a half for OT”
there are a TON of employees who will insist on Option A.
It’s still illegal, though, and the employer still remains liable, and the employee can still sue, and the damages are unchanged by the employee’s conduct. When that employee walks into my office two years later, the employer is SOL.
And there’s a good reason for that. Among other things, the goal is to scare all employers into acting legally, so that there ARE no employers who offer “option A.” Employers need to know the law.
But it can certainly be pretty upsetting for the employer who grudgingly agrees to give the employee what they want, and who gets sued for it later.
And now I am off list for a while, to go file an enormous lawsuit on behalf of some employees. This one is great because the employer is a TOTAL asshole and is literally stealing their tips, even after they met with me and I gave them a copy of the statute to pass on. Can’t wait to see his face.
Sorry, G&W, I mistook you as saying that it should be legal to force someone to work without pay as a form of punishment. My bad.