Firing for Speech
Debates on whether employers can legally and ethically fire employees for expressing controversial opinions, political views, or speech outside work, often citing free speech limits, at-will employment, and cases like James Damore.
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Free speech doesn’t mean not getting fired. You can get fired in any county for things that you say (e.g. insulting your coworkers, lying to your boss, defaming your employer on social media, …). The exact laws and social conventions obviously vary from country to country, but this shouldn’t be a difficult concept in general.
About the same as "employee says controversial thing in personal life". In other words, employer has absolutely every right to fire them for their self-expression.
It's certainly illegal to fire someone over that opinion, yes.
""The implication is that for any employee-employer relationship, if the employee is critical of the employer's position on some politically relevant social issue, they can be sacked.""Being in America where you can get fired for anything or laid off with zero notice, this doesn't seem too unusual.Maybe I'm missing something.
What if voicing a controversial opinion gets you fired?
Yes, calling for a company to fire someone is generally protected under the First Amendment. (There might be some edge cases, like if a state has a criminal anti-discrimination law and someone is inciting the company (to unlawfully fire a specific person specifically on the basis on a legally protected characteristic).)But the ideal of freedom of expression is broader than limitations on the powers of government. The ideal also encompasses social norms that encourage open and honest discuss
I think there's different scenarios.1. Someone loses popularity and thus their business suffers from it.This is totally fine. I'm free not to purchase your books, music, products, services, etc. even if simply because I disagree with you on some things.2. Someone is fired because people disagree with their ideas or thoughts.Now this can be wrong and it can also be alright:2.1 Someone expressed an opinion which respected other people's rights, but where a lot of peop
Private companies are not free speech zones. Not firing this person would have been a Title VII violation and opened them to lawsuits.
This comment by macrael includes a link that explains the legal issue:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14966388Regardless of what you think of the merits, a public corporation can't afford a persistent shadow of workplace discrimination. Firing the responsible employee was the only possible option.It's not a free speech issue, as there is no such thing in a work environ
There is no rule that states that a person should be free to say anything without any consequences.He made a choice to say some words and based on those words people felt they would be better off without him in their workplace. Seems fair to me, people have been fired for much less.