Meet a Work Buddy, Get Fired
You catch a beer with a colleague from work to watch a game at the local bar, or team up for an AIDS charity event.
Bing. You're fired, at least according to policy at Guardmark, a security guard firm.
And it's all legal. But then, most people think their boss can't fire them for all sorts of reasons, but without a union in the workplace -- where any discharge usually requires a job-related performance failure -- you can be fired because your employer doesn't like your politics, your hair style or what you do in your free time.
This example come from the National Labor Relations Board, which sees no conflict between banning workers getting together in their free time and those workers having the right to talk to each other about working conditions and the freedom to form a union.
As the company policy states:
you must NOT . . . fraternize on duty or off duty, date or become overly friendly with the client's employees or with co-employees.The two Republican appointees on the NLRB panel assumed that workers would understand this was meant to avoid romantic entanglements and not deter workers from talking about workplace concerns on their off hours. But as the Democratic appointee on the panel argued in dissent:
The primary meaning of the term "fraternize," in turn, is "to associate in a brotherly manner," Webster's New World Dictionary 555 (2d ed. 1984), and that kind of association is the essence of workplace solidarity. Thus, I believe that employees could reasonably under-stand the rule to trench upon their right...to join together for mutual aid or protection.Isolating people at work so that they fear to talk to each other is a lovely Orwellian tactic by employers to deter any dissent in the workplace. That GOP appointees on the labor board would rubberstamp it is not a surprise, but it should be a wakeup call to most employees to realize that their boss has the right to control what they do in their free time as much as what they do at work.
Didn't Wal-Mart catch a lot of heat for this sort of thing?
July 28, 2005 6:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bah. The NLRB doesn't protect people who get fired for trying to form a union, either. They just don't protect people, period.
July 28, 2005 7:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
Is there anything useful that the NLRB does, or would workers be better of without it?
July 28, 2005 3:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nathan, I followed the links to the definition of NLRB which is…(to my surprise)
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB):
“Agency created by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and continued through subsequent amendment, whose functions are to define the appropriate bargaining units, to hold elections, to determine whether a majority of workers want to be represented by a specific union or no union, to certify unions to represent employees, to interpret and apply the Act's provisions prohibiting certain employer and union unfair practices, and otherwise to administer the provisions of the Act.”
The NLRB seems to have come a long way from its point of origin in 1935. Unfair practices indeed!
Thank you also for posting the link to the study on free trade!
July 28, 2005 10:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Is the interpretation of the ban as keeping people from being friends hypothetical or has it actually happened?
July 29, 2005 12:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's hypothetical in this particular case, but other cases have upheld other bans on friendship, such as employees becoming friends with customers. So this is the next step.
And just the announcement of the policy, as the dissent notes, puts a chill in free speech, since most employees don't want to find out if an employer rule is "hypothetical" or not.
July 29, 2005 6:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
To confuse matters--this is a bit stricter than usual, but close to the common boilerplate language that companies put in employment contracts (and enforce) to protect themselves from sexual harassment claims. In other words, it's a collision of two progressive causes.
August 1, 2005 6:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
No progressives advocate companies restricting employee freedom to socialize -- except in the case of supervisors and subordinates -- so to call this a clash between progressive goals is mistaken.
Employers may prefer to punish employees for what they do off-the-job rather than take serious responsibility for what happens in the workplace, but that is an employer tactic, not a demand of those fighting sexual harassment.
August 1, 2005 7:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Progressives may not "promote bans on off-the-job socializing"--but harassment law as currently interpreted DOES hold employers liable for their employees off-the-job interactions with one another. See http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/harass/breadth.htm, "What Speech does Hostile Work Environment Harassment Law Restrict", especially footnmote 18.
August 1, 2005 7:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
They did in Germany; not here in the US, though, to my knowledge.
August 8, 2005 10:45 AM | Reply | Permalink