Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is glad to see that the Minister of Agriculture has finally admitted that he is not tolerant of different political views. It is a relief to your Maximum Leader. Now he doesn’t have to go in and edit all the horribly intolerant posts (which the Smallholder fills with invective) and make the deeply repressed “independently principled” (aka: squishy) Smallholder show through.
But speaking about the case of the woman fired for the Kerry sticker on her car… Were your Maximum Leader advising the factory owner concerning the firing, he would certainly hope for more of an issue than a sticker on the workers car. Your Maximum Leader will not claim to be an expert in Alabama employment law, but those of us who want to mitigate the chances of being sued would act with more care in terminating someone.
Alabama is a right to work state, which really doesn’t have any bearing on this case except to say that your Maximum Leader doubts if the fired woman will have a Union legal fund to help her out should she choose to sue. (Of course, if Kerry doesn’t win the Presidency, John Edwards may chooseto do some pro-bono work for her and sue the pants off the factory owner. Thereby enriching himself, and putting all those factory workers out of jobs - which would be outsourced to Mexico or Thailand anyway.)
The more interesting point to know would be if Alabama is an “at-will” employment state. That is to say that all employees are “at-will” and generally employers don’t have to give much (any) reason to terminate someone.
However, it is always best to have some logical (documented) reason to terminate someone. For example, performance issues. Was the woman meeting any sort of performance quota? If she was not, easy answer - termination. Was the woman fulfilling all of the terms of her employment contract or following the rules set out in some sort of employee policy manual? Your Maximum Leader has known of a number of companies that have expressly written into their employee policy manual that open displays of political or religious affiliation (from desk decoration to protheletizing in the break room) are prohibited. These policys are generally carefully crafted by attorneys and explained clearly to new employees at the onset of employment by a Human Resources Manager. If such a policy existed at this factory, that could be a justification behind terminating someone. But your Maximum Leader thinks it might be a stretch.
Of course, the woman could just hope for the best and pray Kerry wins and gives her some sort of patronage job.
Carry on.
