In context, the complaints about the material itself seem pretty pretextual.

Edit

A frustrating detail here, just in the sense that it's petty turtles all the way down here: the arbitrator found that WHYY's social media policy, which prohibits "inflammatory" speech without qualification, was in fact binding and did provide WHYY with cause to terminate (the arbitrary was vocal about how stupid they felt this policy was).

The reason Grievant got the reinstatement order was that WHYY's HR fucked up their own process and committed to the termination procedure without including Grievant's direct manager in that process. A pure technicality.

In any event, good work by the SAG AFTRA legal team, and it's nice to have the arbitrator overturn this kind of petty bullshit.

It reads to me like HR at WHYY picked a turf fight and, in losing it, cost WHYY a quarter million dollars. The original HR instigator appears to have been promoted.

This adds a huge amount of context to this article. A big issue was that he was doing comedy, it's that he was doing it on company time.

The article mentions things like "raises concerns about the boundaries of remote work" and I was completely confused why they kept bringing up working from home if the article was bout inflammatory jokes.

I'll add that I am on Jad's side here, but the full un-biased picture is important.

Here's a note sent to him by his immediate manager (who was supportive but cut out of the firing decision):

> Hey Jad, I just want to give you a heads up that somebody within WHYY is agitating about your stand-up comedy stuff. I have gotten questions from HR – in terms of “How come Jad can do stand up but he can’t work in the office?” And somebody even reached out to Bill [Marrazzo, CEO] [...] I have no idea who that person is – or why they are doing this. So far, I have been able to deflect any inquiries, and I said that your doctor is most worried about stress. I said that being in the office causes you stress, whereas stand-up comedy does not. [...]

To make a case that coming into an office to work causes you undue stress, but that standing up in front of a bunch of people to do comedy does not, is a big stretch. Seems like an abuse of medical leave, to me.

Just about anything that "raises concerns about remote work" simply means one or more pro-office people have used it as an excuse to question remote work. Companies rarely question the boundaries of in person work when firing employees for actions caught while representing the company off hours (driving company vehicle, wearing company uniform).

As I understand it, SAG-AFTRA already has a general concern (not confined to this specific case) about how WFH affects the working conditions of employees:

> “Something that the union is kind of concerned about is the way remote work has changed the way we work,” Sleiman said. “We’re always online, on Slack and shit, so when are we off the clock?

> The arbitrator was not a fan across the board. They found that one joke was “insightful, principled and serious, but not very funny.” Sleiman said he was disappointed by this review.

My favorite part is probably when the arbiter explains how "the use of the word “fuckable” when applied to elderly women approaching their grave can be interpreted as mildly inflammatory"

First, the transcript of the routine:

Believe me, even woke people kind of hate Muslims don’t they? Yup. “Refugees are welcome…to start treating their women a little better.” Wait, it is true that like women are treated a little better in the west for a while. After like 35, 40 it gets pretty brutal, doesn’t it? There’s no retirement age for looking hot in the west. That’s why you see American grandmas wearing makeup and shit. American women have to be as fuckable as possible until they’re dead, which I don’t think is fair. Y'all I want to start a rescue charity that helps women of a certain age move to Saudi Arabia. They’re gonna be like, “What, I don’t gotta to do botox or dye my hair?” I’m like, “Lady, you don’t even gotta drive. In fact, yeah, they prefer you didn’t.”

And here's the analysis:

The first half is hardly inflammatory, suggesting that Americans encourage Muslim refugees to treat their women better, and that women in the west are generally treated better than in Muslim countries, at least for a while. Grievant then opines that after a woman in the U.S. becomes 35 or 40, it gets “pretty brutal,” which is provocative but cannot be interpreted as inflammatory. He then states that older women in America are expected to continue looking “hot,” resulting in American grandmothers wearing “makeup and shit.” So far, it cannot be interpreted as inflammatory. He then states: “American women have to be as fuckable as possible until they’re dead, which I don’t think is fair.” Although the first clause is debatable and grossly articulated, the second clause plainly states that Grievant believes it to be unfair, so any claim that the clip shows him to be demeaning women in the clip, as charged by management, is patently unfair and untrue. On the other hand, the use of the word “fuckable” when applied to elderly women approaching their grave can be interpreted as mildly inflammatory.

The final few sentences in which he proposes starting a charity to help women move to Saudi Arabia, where they do not have to use botox or dye their hair and they are encouraged not to drive cannot be interpreted as inflammatory and are simply funny.

I also love how the analyst is trying to be objective as possible and their own dry delivery makes it all twice as funny.

> I have gotten questions from HR - in terms of “How come Jad can do stand up but he can’t work in the office?”

Probably why the attacks on the clips are so weak. High up guy was being petty. But they couldn't fired him for not being in the office.

I hope someone here has a valid link...

Or on a promotional poster: “Not very funny. — Arbitrator [name]”

Sounds straightforwardly punitive and cruel behavior to me, not just cowardly, overzealous CYA stuff.

Most Americans (roughly 70%) are happy with their health insurance. That's a reason to be defensive other than it "being the status quo".

And I pay more for this, just in terms of my monthly premiums, not to mention all of the out of pocket and deductible costs, than I would in taxes for healthcare in just about any other developed country.

I don't know what metric people are using when saying that they are "happy" with their health insurance, other than comparing it to being uninsured in this country, in which case, sure, it beats that.

[1]: this arrangement is also technically illegal in California, but worked around with a Three Corporations In a Nonprofit Trenchcoat sort of deal. The seams mostly don't show.

The medical system in the U.S. is awful, and it really is broken that it is tied to a job.

A system where you need to be well enough to work to get care to work is obviously not ideal.

My wife runs a business and employs, typically, only 1 or 2 people; when they started asking for health insurance we found that getting insurance (as a business) was actually not terribly expensive; at the same time my insurance plans have gotten progressively more crappy.

I can't remember, or be bothered to find out -- how expensive is it these days to just get private insurance in the USA if you've got 3 hideously expensive pre existing conditions? I have some vague recollection that the obamacare thing requires that insurance companies offer coverage to people without regard to those preexisting conditions, and intuitively that seems "fair" but it's all such a pile of crap it's frustrating to dig through and demotivating. I assume "that's the way they like it."

Take a look at your state's healthcare marketplace site. You should be able to browse plans if you put in your county/zip code and participant ages. Marketplace plans can't charge based on health history, and at least in my area, they all seem to cover the minimum required services and nothing else; they compete on networks and copay/coinsurance.

It's not the giant morass of pain that it used to be, but it's still somewhat of a pain, and often employer based plans are better; especially in terms of networks and out of area coverage.

Means-testing is just a very inefficient, clumsy way of providing benefits to people and functionally operates as a tax on those who would benefit from the service but would fail the test.

There are enough “easy” solutions if the only goal is well-being of the citizen. That’s not always the priority for some obscure reason

Besides decoupling the insurance from employment to facilitate career changes and even quitting, it would also bring down the average price of insurance for people who currently get it on the individual market as the average corporate worker is statistically healthier than the rest of the population.

Eliminating the tax deduction is not enough as even at break even the company offering health insurance is a net win from the lower risk pool. It had to be an additional penalty / tax.

It’s not really “easy” to reform/change anything this significant in the US. It is not like a European country with a functioning modern parliament that can make laws. In the US system both major parties have to agree in order to pass anything of substance, which due to hyper-polarization means essentially nothing gets passed.

The US healthcare system is stuck in a deep local minima. The cost of transitioning to a different equilibrium is so high that it is obviously politically infeasible any most if not all States. I don't like the current system but if there was a viable path to a different model, at least some States would have taken it.

I don't know anything about Pennsylvania, maybe it's easier there.

My father had MS, and he was considered a fraud (back in the 70s). Of course, such is easily said if there are no repercussions (I, parent of two young children, have been called a pedophile by my neighbors ...). It is very likely he also had autism, like me, a burden to function in society and a mark on your forehead cause "you're weird".

I've been suffering from a burnout (related to my neighbor's behavior) since start last year and when I applied for benefits because I got fired I've been told I should've reported myself fully healed earlier. I've also been asked questions to which the answers weren't written down because (and I quote) "I'm not allowed to ask that question".

If you apply for any social benefits, society considers you a fraud and you have to prove you're not. This is immense work, more so for people who suffer from disabilities (likely those who rightfully apply).

They just usually cannot afford it, even though there are subsidies available, most people will not earn or save enough to pay the deductibles / out of pocket max.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_tax_credit

I ended up waiting for Medicare eligibility anyway which, with supplemental and prescription drug coverage is probably not nearly as much cheaper as a lot of people assume.

In the 1960s when healthcare costs began to rise there was a conversation around changing it, but by 1970s it was concluded that on balance tying it to employment had benefits in reducing labor action (strikes), which was a big concern back then. We've stuck with it since.

On the other hand, as long as you have that card everything is really cheap, which is definitely not true in the US.

Gradually these perks started to become as important of a consideration as the salary itself. Unfortunately health insurance is easily misused. We started relying on it to pay for all health care, rather than to actually mitigate the risk of a sudden medical bill. The result has been a rapid and continual increase in the price of health care over the last 70–80 years caused directly by the fact that nobody pays for the services they use, but instead pays into insurance plans that then pay for the care.

In fact, I think this guy overstated the risk to his health. If you get fired you don’t actually lose your insurance. You sign up for continuation of coverage from COBRA, taking over payments for the insurance from your employer, and then purchase an individual or family insurance plan of your own before COBRA runs out. Or get hired somewhere else and sign on to one of their insurance plans. Either way you’ve lost nothing, at least in terms of health care.

I don't think it's as simple as that. Empirically, lots of countries have health insurance systems whose incentive structure could be described in the same way, yet the US is an extreme outlier in healthcare costs. Something else must be going on.

- top-skill, top-paid specialists

- world-class research hospitals with near-luxury-level amenities

- cutting edge pharmaceuticals, including absurdly expensive novel biologics

that is enjoyed by, say, a junior Microsoft developer and her family in Seattle.

One example of how this plays out as GP described is childbirth: There’s something like a 5X cost disparity for a typical birth process between a perfectly competent regional hospital and an elite research institution. But the typical well-insured US mother-to-be doesn’t spend a moment thinking about that difference vs., say, the reported quality of the food.

Obviously, this is not every American’s experience with the system, but for the portion of outlier costs that aren’t related to outlier US population health trends (e.g. obesity), it’s an important part of the story.

Your definition of "typical" apparently is very different from my own, or we are thinking about "well insured" very differently. Every pregnant person that I've ever talked to, if they have a choice at all, has weighed the projected cost heavily in their decision on where to give birth.

The typical person in the US has a deductible that runs well past several thousand dollars and then they have to pay a coinsurance amount, which could be up to 25% of the cost, up to absurdly high out of pocket maxes.

And yes, the cost weighs highly in mind every time we make a decision about whether we need to go to the doctor or not. Not knowing if this trip to the doctor is going to be the one that bankrupts us (cancer diagnosis?), I tend to simply not go unless a limb is falling off. My wife on the other hand came from a country with socialized health care, and can't shake the habit of just going to the doctor whenever she feels ill or injured. Then I have to be the bad guy with the "honey I know you feel sick but do you feel that sick? We're looking at a minimum bill of many hundreds of dollars out of pocket every time you go."

Just a new source of income to pay the rent, or a free place to sleep since you can’t afford rent anymore, now that you’re paying for health insurance instead.

It can easily be dispensed of and nothing would change, people would simply need to go to healthcare.gov.

Health insurance and healthcare is NOT tied to your employer in the US.

However, many employers pay 50% to 70% or even 100% of the health insurance premiums for their employees, and employees can use pre tax income to pay health insurance premiums if purchased by their employer.

The problem has always been this tax advantage of your employer purchasing it, AND most Americans opting to not purchase it due to cost.

Note that there are significant subsidies available if you earn less than 400% of the federal poverty level, although that may still leave many unable to purchase it (or the deductible/oop max is so high it would not make any difference).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_tax_credit

> If you end up needing a hospital stay, you could be in trouble if the "wrong" doctors do a drive-by.

This is not true since the No Surprises Act went into effect Jan 1, 2022. Everything is considered in network in an emergency, and if a doctor works in an in network hospital, then the doctor is considered in network too.

Usually in an emergency I don't have the presence of mind to direct the ambulance to the right hospital (in case the emergency turns into an overnight stay), and it's all the more important if the plan doesn't have good (or any) out of network benefits.

By "insist," I mean that leaving would be against medical advice -- and I know some insurance will refuse to pay for the preceding stay.

I wish this stuff weren't so hard to make sense of.

Who knows how well it works in practice.

Also, the age rating factors being capped at 3 allows older people’s health insurance premiums to be much lower before age 65, although I maintain that this young to old wealth transfer is not beneficial for society.

COBRA is good insofar that it lets people know the real cost of health insurance.

Thats the cost for covering everything under the sun + every bad habit + risky behavior. Instead of you know: emergencies, no fault accidents, and unexpected genetic problems. (Like, say car insurance)

Not only is this a strange opinion, that you want some kind of entity to decide whether or not each of our health conditions are at-fault, your analogy to car insurance isn't even true in no-fault states, of which there are many.

Comedian: yeah for them

Made me laugh out loud. Wish I had that kind of confidence!

Of course, tinged with his Scottish brand of existential dread.

I'm not sure the fact that he's Scottish has much to do with your appreciation of the comedy in the linked sketch per se. It falls into a tradition of British sketch comedy which is quite different in style to improv originated sketch comedy in North America - more confronting and unsettling.

Before you completely write it off, watch a few episodes of the series, or look at his Twitter.

Strangely enough, I grew up in Germany and the only German show I remember at all is Asterix and Obelix but that may have been a language barrier thing.

I'll check it out!

It can work the other way as well. I actually like Hitman Agent 47 which got an epically bad rating of 8% from the critics though audiences were more indulgent at 40%. [0] It was comforting to read in the comments that the previous movie was less horrible. It should be an excellent viewing experience.

[0] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/hitman_agent_47

Here's the rule about comedy: either you get it, or you don't and move on. The deeper you dive in, the more unbearably cringy it becomes, and no one will ever be able to convince you whether it is actually funny. Let it go, man.

Here's one to cheer you up: time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Also I think the joke is Scottish agnostic, it would have worked for me in an accent, if I'd have seen an American doing it, and insisting to stick with it, it would still be funny. Wouldn't feel out of place on "I think you should leave right now".

the other meme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzKo1JPNf4s

The other part of the ruling is being forgotten here I think. It says he has to take down his social media clips.

If it were me, I wouldn't. That said, I can see where people have legitimate money concerns. They have to live.

Did anyone actually find them inflammatory, or was the justification that "someone" "might" find them inflammatory? If some individual raised a complaint that's one thing, but sounds like a massive overreaction.

> in 1966 I discovered that something very good had happened: the race question had disappeared from the security clearance form. In fact, this question disappeared from nearly all government forms then. I liked to think I helped that change along.

> I have argued that all historical and present racial and ethnic classification systems for individuals are nonsensical and so are the laws, court decisions, computer applications, and bureaucratic superstructures that have been built on top of them.

I’m regularly asked that question in official contexts in the last few years. American companies make hiring decisions now based on racial identification. Big companies even require their vendors and service providers to factor race into staffing decisions.

It’s illegal under American law, but in the last decade or so corporate HR departments have gotten some funny ideas.

If you as an employer were to take _any_ actions based on that information it would be illegal.

So after you get hired and provide that information for government statistics collection, why would your employer ever need to ask you for it afterwards?

Because your employer wants to collect statistics too.

Virtually every good joke could be considered, "inflammatory" by someone.

Not very long ago in developed countries "agitating for women's suffrage" or "kissing a person of the same sex" or "a white woman marrying a black man" would be inflammatory. In many places it still is.

But many people have said essentially the same thing, over the course of many years. I think there’s a moment for each of us when we realize that our worldview isn’t substantially similar to that of others anymore, especially younger people.

> The arbitrator said that he read this policy as not incorporating a “reasonable person” standard, meaning that workers “must be vigilant not to post anything on social media that could conceivably be interpreted as inflammatory even by highly sensitive and thin-skinned individuals without an appreciation for irony or satire.”

I guess you can't really do that with standup comedy since your face and voice are clearly visible and audible.

We got on pretty well while pairing and after a few weeks he let me know his secret under the condition that I couldn't let anyone on the team know. His concern really was having HR getting wind of this and scouring the internet for material.

I mean. Maybe he did, and he wisened up this time and didn't tell anyone about it after he picked a new name to continue doing it under.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Comic

In fact, the employer still wins:

> As part of the decision, Sleiman was to delete the nine videos cited. He was also asked to delete any “offensive post-discharge” posts where he disparaged the company for his firing.

It's much safer to lay low and don't say anything too provokative, but that's a danger to a healthy democracy.

I suppose that, as you say, they are worried about adding fuel to the fire by firing the parties who were actually at fault. Personally, I doubt it would. What's most likely to happen is that they get it wrong in both cases: first, damaging their reputation by firing someone who didn't do anything, and then later not firing someone who did damage their reputation, thus damaging their public reputation (perhaps) and hurting their internal reputation and morale (one would assume).

It will. In this example, publicly firing the guy who ordered Sleiman's termination can be construed as "American firing Hamas Sympathizer fired and sympathizer reinstated"

A culture war is a two way street. No reason to further fan the flames.

It’s like the difference between a salesman ranting on Facebook about how a competitor sucks, versus a marketing campaign that’s an attack ad on a competitor.

Probably a wise strategy - and a useful background to have when fighting the sort of people who sack others for jokes on contentious subjects.

He is also able to afford rent and food.

I mean, you've got social commentary about "the court said this was a solution, let's see how it goes" and "everyone says getting the courts to order your employer to give you your job back is a pyrrhic victory, but what happens when you do it?" and you've got the cringe angle of the awkward interactions with HR and the bosses who fired you, and the justice porn angle of bullying a bad employer.

Plus if he decides he doesn't want the job any more, he can always put the posts back up and see what happens.

Also, this guys is a good comedian. I've done stand up (and even killed before) and that shit is HARD.

Add to that the discipline of delivering the lines with the right timing, tone and pace.

Stand up comedians are some of the smartest people I've come across. Also, they're some of the most f'd up people i've met too. Its a weird combo, but I like them a lot.

Wait—you can do that!? I thought the whole point of arbitration was that you committed to the arbiter's decisions, no matter what, to lower legal costs.

> “Like, ‘What do you mean? You’re off hours, you’re having fun with, like, creative expression, of course you should get fired for that,’ ” he said. “But I hate that that’s become normal. And I want to be an example of like, no, your employer doesn’t own you.”

This is a terrifying state of affairs. Similar to the whole "all code you write, on or off hours, belongs to us" some tech companies try to pull.

One is primarily companies not wanting to take any risk that IP could walk out the door through off hours work.

The other is that for sufficiently visible and controversial off hours activities, it’s hard to divorce the person 100% from their employer and that’s a PR problem and a distraction many employers are quick to remedy.

When I was an industry analyst, anything I said related to the industry even on a personal blog or Twitter account was (somewhat reasonably) taken as my professional opinion not really separable from what I wrote as part of my job.

I've heard a story about someone from Europe travelling to the US to work for IBM. He was in the process of choosing a house, and was told that it was too modest. That is, "not the kind of house expected of an IBM engineer". Clearly in the US the line between your job and personal life is so blurry it's often hard to even see.

From my perspective this looks like a problem in and of itself, but it gets magnified tenfold when coupled with "at will" employment and work-tied health insurance: it means your employer owns you, 24/7. Isn't slavery supposed to be abolished?

Then there are the obvious Free Speech implications. The US has supposedly freer speech than Europe, but how free is your speech really is if your employer can fire you and terminate your health insurance the instant your boss stumbles upon something you said he didn't like?

Hmm really? Citation needed.

I think that mostly ended by the dotcom era though. As an intern in 2001, everybody there wore casual clothes just like at a startup.

The point is that it doesn’t have to be controversial at all. They can fire you for whatever reason they want. He didn’t cross any lines because there was never any line to begin with. His healthcare is at the mercy of a dictatorship.

If you hire someone as a personality (e.g. radio reporter, CEO) their actions at all times clearly affect you. No perfect solution will exist.

They'll lose close minded people and gain a lot of open minded ones. The open minded tend to have a healthier mental state, have higher income, and attract more ad revenue.

And I don't think it's likely that the firing was motivated by the fear of bad financial results, but ideologically driven.

They already have all the listeners of that category that they're going to have.

Stuff happens. I'm unfairly held accountable for my gender, my age, the way I dress, and so on. I have to suck it up; so should WHYY.

I think US law (I'm not USAian) is extremely liberal in the kinds of contracts it allows employers to impose on staff. I think that's cause for regret; unless you're paying someone to work for you 24/7/365, or the employment contract explicitly says "No off-colour jokes, even on your own time, and we decide what off-colour means", then the employer has to find some other excuse for getting rid of the joker.

But I believe that in most of the USA, an employer can fire an employee for any reason or none. That makes hiring people a lot less risky; but it makes employment much more precarious. It's a rule that makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker, and I personally think it's a bad rule.

Is his work good and true? That’s all that matters for his employer’s reputation.

This idea that journalists have to appear to be impartial ascetics should die. They are humans, and humans have perspectives no matter how they hide them. The hiding is what provides the fuel that a journalist is biased as if it’s a conspiracy. Knowing where the writer's coming from can be illuminating, and I can weight their biases myself.

That's not how reputation works.

Just like Tesla was recently caught having their employees in Sweden sign contracts like that, including terms that prohibited employees from talking about anything going on at Tesla, even after the left the company, for life...

> Among other things, employees agree to never, ever tell anyone anything about the company. Employees also have to pay a fine if they quit Tesla and take a competing job within six months.

https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/sverige/tystnadsplikt-livet...

Seems like it's a US tactic that now is trying to be spread into other parts of the world. Terrifying indeed.

Good luck monitoring that enforcing that

Also, pretty sure that goes against the 1st amendment and if memory serves right, no contract can change people’s federal rights or change any laws

Edit: had a derp moment and totally commented without remembering the “Sweden” key word here. Ignore me, I’m wrong for many reasons

I'm pretty sure it does not. Tesla is not the government and Musk is not, yet, president. There is precious little in the US constitution governing employer-employee relations. In fact, by not allowing such agreements, any government arguably violates the contracts clause. The US constitution frees people, which includes granting them freedom to sign stupid contracts.

Have you ever been part of a corporate re-org where you were technically laid off and rehired and thus were legally forced to sign a new agreement? Such freedom!

All "contracts" that fit a pattern of take-it-or-leave-it with a zillion provisions should be negotiated by the government, a union, or some other collective entity with a reasonable claim to protecting the interests of the side that has no leverage alone.

Plenty of agreements are heavily constrained by regulators, (think insurance for example) and we take it for granted, so I am not suggesting any radical idea, just pushing back on the weasels who are always working at corrupting things.

> "I should not agree with your young friends," said Marcus curtly, "I am so old-fashioned as to believe in free contract."

> "I, being older, perhaps believe in it even more," answered M. Louis smiling. "But surely it is a very old principle of law that a leonine contract is not a free contract. And it is hypocrisy to pretend that a bargain between a starving man and a man with all the food is anything but a leonine contract."

> He glanced up at the fire-escape, a ladder leading up to the balcony of a very high attic above. "I live in that garret; or rather on that balcony. If I fell off the balcony and hung on a spike, so far from the steps that somebody with a ladder could offer to rescue me if I gave him a hundred million francs, I should be quite morally justified in using his ladder and then telling him to go to hell for his hundred million. Hell, indeed, is not out of the picture; for it is a sin of injustice to force an advantage against the desperate [...]"

-- The Paradoxes of Mr Pond (1937) by G.K. Chesterton

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500421.txt