On Firing Nazis
The firing of several individuals for their participation in last weekend’s white nationalist rally in Charlottesville has raised some interesting, yet fraught, questions about employment law, free speech, and related issues. At the outset it should be clarified, with unyielding insistence, that to examine these questions is in no way to make excuses for or “defend” Nazis, white nationalists, or anyone else of their kin. Such people espouse beliefs which are very obviously repugnant and worthy of unqualified condemnation.
That being said, The Atlantic’s Gillian B. White explored some of these uncomfortable issues in an August 14 post entitled: “Is Being a White Supremacist Grounds for Firing?” Commenting on the social media campaign which culminated in several rally-goers getting terminated, White writes:
Of course, the consequence of this dynamic is that taboo political ideas of all stripes can lead to workplace sanctions. While many on the political left are now lauding firings as a way to hold white supremacists accountable, it’s also worth remembering that pressuring employers to sever ties based on political activities, or social and racial beliefs, has historically been targeted in the other direction. McCarthyism involved reporting Communists and Communist sympathizers and pushing them out of the workforce, and Hollywood in particular. And as Walter Greason, a historian and professor at Monmouth University said in an interview, “Historically it’s more dangerous as an employee to be associated with racial justice and the NAACP, than it was to be affiliated with the KKK.”
The point, obviously, is not to suggest that the rally-goers should evade censure. To the contrary, they deserve forceful censure for taking part in that shameful event and for holding views which are inherently dehumanizing. But the rejoicing on the part of liberals and leftists in response to their termination glosses over deeper issues: do we wish to empower employers — especially, in this case, large corporate employers like Uno pizzeria and Lucky supermarket — to be the ones doing the censuring?
Here’s the crux: the fact is that these employees were apparently terminated on the basis of legal political activity. As repugnant as their activity was, and as morally blameworthy, it was still legal (hence the ACLU’s advocacy for them in court). If we are going to cheer employers’ willingness to terminate employees for engaging in legal political speech, we should be aware of the wider implications, and be cognizant of how such a principle might be used against people with whom we share political affinity.
In making these points I’ve been frequently rebuffed by people claiming that at-will employment has been a “thing” for ages, and if these disreputable losers should suffer for it, so be it. I agree that at-will employment has been a thing for ages, and if anyone is going to suffer for it, better it be white nationalists and/or Nazis than people with less odious politics. But organized labor objects to at-will employment for a reason: it vastly strengthens the hand of employers in the employee/employer power dynamic.
The reason to raise concerns when this power dynamic is wielded to penalize Nazis is thus: if even the most vile workers, such as Nazis, are due free speech safeguards, an arbitration process, and attendant protections, then that strengthens and universalizes the underlying principle that all workers are owed such protections. Including pro-Palestine ralliers, Occupy ralliers, or even Stalinist ralliers. All workers: irrespective of the political beliefs they’re espousing.
To reiterate, if even these Nazi scumbags were to have been afforded basic worker protections — again, the kind that organized labor advocates for as a central premise of its existence — then that would strengthen and universalize the underlying principle: that workers should be judged on the basis of what they do while they are on the job, and that employers don’t have total domain over what they do in the rest of their lives.
Also at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf proposes several criteria for when it might be warranted to fire workers on the basis of their legal political speech. Friedersdorf is correct to note that the firings of the white nationalist rally-goers bring to bear two norms which are, potentially, in friction with one another. The first norm is that workers ought to be able to engage in off-hours political speech without fear of punishment from their employers. The second norm is that societal resources ought to be marshaled to discourage people from embracing repugnant beliefs, such as Nazism. Both norms are products of reasonable moral intuition.
A norm it would be prudent to protect is that workers — especially workers under the thumb of large, profitable corporations — should be judged for their workplace, on-hours activity rather than their off-hours, legal activity. That way, a Palestine liberation activist couldn’t be terminated because her ardently pro-Israel manager finds her views repugnant and/or sees his “safety” as being jeopardized, even though she hasn’t tangibly done anything on-the-job to jeopardize his safety. Per this norm, individuals are afforded maximum liberty to express political views, even repugnant views, so long as those views don’t translate into physical violence.
As Friedersdorf’s colleague pointed out, had these white nationalist losers been federal government employees, it would’ve likely been illegal to fire them on the grounds they were fired on by Uno and Lucky. That’s because they apparently didn’t do anything illegal, and federal government workers enjoy much greater protections which allow them to engage in political activity without having to fear workplace retribution. That’s the fundamental tension here. Had the kind of protections, which organized labor has been advocating for eons, been in effect at these men’s workplaces, it would’ve been much harder to terminate them so quickly.
I’ve often been asked: how can you expect workers of color, Jews, or others to tolerate working alongside people who espouse such dehumanizing views? My answer: you shouldn’t expect that. Workers of color would be more than justified in finding this situation intolerable. But let’s say a worker of color in the public sector found out that her colleague was a bonafide Nazi. If the colleague didn’t engage in any intimidating, racist, or otherwise harmful behaviors while actually on-the-job, it’s unclear what recourse she would have to seek the colleague’s termination (I’m open to being educated more here on the specifics, as I’m not an expert on employment law).
Again, it’s worth adding an additional qualifier—because there can never be enough—that the people who attended this rally, and were eager to find common cause with avowed Nazis, were shameful. But the operative question here pertains to the employee/employer power dynamic, which in these circumstances were weighted so heavily in favor of the employer that the employees had little or no opportunity to contest their firings. And that opportunity should be available, ideally, to all workers, especially low-wage workers, even if they are vile people. Because if you give protections even to vile people, you enshrine the principle that these protections are universal, rather than contingent on someone’s personal character or political views.
Friedersdorf suggests several criteria for when the “off-hours political speech ought not to result in termination” norm might be worth violating. The first is, “is this person hateful” — as in, if the person’s political beliefs are expressed especially hatefully, it might be justified to fire him on that ground. But there’s a distinction to be drawn here. If we are talking about whether an individual expresses overt hatefulness — aggressively upbraiding others, speaking vulgarly and/or confrontationally — that could be put in a different category than someone who harbors “hateful” ideology. For instance, a person might have the most uncontroversial political views imaginable — let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the person is a generic, milquetoast liberal — and yet expresses those views in a way that is vulgar, confrontational, or even hateful: “You didn’t vote for Hillary? You sack of shit, sub-human lowlife prick.”
Whereas, on the other hand, a person who harbors political views which are themselves intrinsically hateful — such as Nazism or some other view which advocates the forced expulsion of minority groups — might communicate those views in a manner which is decidedly non-confrontational or not overtly aggressive/hostile. In fact, the most successful proponents of repugnant ideologies are frequently those who can maintain an air of decorum about themselves, who don’t run around spewing outwardly brash hatefulness—even if their beliefs are themselves fundamentally hateful. If we’re talking about how to dole out employment penalties, it’s not clear how these categories could be distinguished, even if they are patently distinguishable categories.
The next criterion Friedersdorf suggests for when it’s proper to terminate a person for their political views is when the person espouses views which are “inseparable from violence.” But again, this category is inherently hazy, and would invariably come down to the subjective whim of the employer. Suppose a worker takes the view that Israel should not be a Jewish state. The worker believes that non-Jews should be forcibly integrated into Israeli society so as to eliminate the society’s Jewish character. There are plenty of Israelis who might regard a view such as this as “inseparable from violence” because, by their lights, it compromises their safety. Couldn’t such a view be grounds for termination, under this criterion?
Take another example: a worker is staunchly pro-war, and wants the United States government to invade, say, Iran. The worker has a set of political beliefs that view a US invasion of Iran as a moral necessity. How could that belief be regarded as anything other than “inseparable from violence,” if the explicit aim of the view is to call for violence? Are we not putting state violence in the same category as ‘regular’ violence? If so, why not? That would beget yet another long discussion. Which goes to show the ultimate subjectivity of these categories.
Another factor that Friedersdorf suggests be taken into account is “persuadability” — that is, if a person is persuadable, and demonstrates a potential to be talked out of their repugnant beliefs, then perhaps this should be taken into consideration by an employer when contemplating whether to fire the person. But yet again, this gets to the problem of subjectivity. Why should it be within an employer’s charter to persuade an employee out of repugnant beliefs? First of all, couldn’t the employee simply present a facade in order to save his job, and insist to the employer that he has in fact abandoned the repugnant beliefs, even though deep down he has not? Do we really want employers probing the deepest, darkest interior thoughts of an employee, or is that perhaps not the proper role of a corporate managerial bureaucrat?
This is not to say that people who harbor repugnant beliefs can’t be persuaded out of them, or as Friedersdorf puts it, “deprogrammed.” It’s simply to say that asking employers, or managers, or other superiors on the corporate hierarchical ladder to engage in “deprogramming” opens all kind of questionable doors. Would we want the ardently pro-Israel manager to try his hand at “deprogramming” his pro-Palestine subordinate? After all, the pro-Israel manager may well view the subordinate’s beliefs as “violent.”
These reservations should not be construed as a belief that firing avowed Nazis from their jobs is somehow impermissible under all circumstances. I can imagine cases where the firing of Nazis is not just permissible but morally compulsory. It’s just to say that firing people for engaging in off-hours, legally-protected speech raises serious questions about the employee-employer power dynamic that people should be cognizant of — and further, that if organized labor’s preferred employment laws were on the books, such firings would be much harder to carry out so quickly, and may in fact be illegal. These are questions worth considering, and to raise the questions is no defense of Nazis who — for the umpteenth time — are repugnant.
