> He was frustrated that, when he was first fired, people thought it was an obvious conclusion for telling jokes while having a day job.
> “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.
Both cases seem to be mostly a US thing. Here in France, whatever I do outside my job is my own business: I write code on my own time, it's mine. I publish articles on my web site, they do not represent my company.
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?
> 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.
> sufficiently visible and controversial off hours activities
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.
But look at it from the organization's side. WHYY will lose listener-ship over his standup, whether or not that's fair. They'll be held accountable to the actions of the people they employ, whether or not that's fair.
Take the ability to control who they associate with out of the hands of a media company and you doom them to being burned by the court of public opinion. Reputation is all a news outlet has.
(It is, perhaps, worth noting that the arbiter didn't disagree with this line of reasoning. Return to employment was conditional on Jad deleting the offending material, so he's not to the place he wants to be regarding the eating of his cake and the having of his cake. It may still be the case that his two desired activities are incompatible with each other).
Same deal in Brendan Eich’s short term as Mozilla’s CEO: the way he was ousted was grossly unreasonable, except that the furore and media circus had compromised his ability to be an effective leader—and so he resigned (voluntarily, according to all parties involved).
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.
I think they'll gain more audience now - through this reinstated reporter - than they out to lose.
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.
Audience attention can be measured in seconds, instead of units of people. That seems to be the focus of modern media. I find it hard to believe they have more than 10% of their potential market's attention span.
> They'll be held accountable to the actions of the people they employ, whether or not that's fair.
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.
If they want to prioritize their ability to ban all expression outside of work they can negotiate that into the CBA - they will just have to give up whatever the union wants in return.
> Take the ability to control who they associate with out of the hands of a media company and you doom them to being burned by the court of public opinion. Reputation is all a news outlet has.
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.
I listen to WHYY, and I never heard about this guy, his work, or his standup. I think WHYY is wrong, and the guy in the story is also kinda wrong. None of that changes whether or not I listen to the programs.
> 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.
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.
Even in the US (which Sweden is not a part of, to be clear) the First Amendment only prevents the US government from abridging your freedom of expression, and only in most cases.
>> Also, pretty sure that goes against the 1st amendment
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.
If nobody ever negotiates the terms of a pre-fabricated contract, then there is no freedom of contract going on, as a matter of common sense.
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
And why not? Congress can choose to discard electors from states excluding candidates (as may happen next year).
“In the 19th century, several state legislatures elected senators in their late twenties despite the Constitutional minimum age of 30, such as Henry Clay, who was sworn into office at age 29, and John Henry Eaton, the youngest U.S. senator in history, who took his oath of office when he was 28 years, 4 months and 29 days old.”
As far as I understand, there isn't really a consensus on what "natural-born citizen" actually means in the context of the US constitution. I'm sure some huge team of lawyers could argue that Musk somehow is "natural-born citizen".
There are some edge cases like “your parents are american but you were born on vacation in france”, but this one is about as crystal clear as you can get: elon was born in SA to a mother who was born in CA to canadian parents and a father who was born in SA to south african parents. He is a naturalized citizen of the US, and ineligible to stand for election for the presidency.
Yeah, which sounds like a fair guess, but the only way to know for sure is for it to be tested in courts, otherwise we're just guessing :) And as we probably all know, having large pockets for lawyers and lobbyists, makes a lot of what we think isn't possible, possible.
... other than "person x has never been and is not presently a citizen" this is as clear as it can get. Naturalized citizens are not eligible to be president, there is no gray space on this matter.
One of the Swedish employees had a wife that posted about the strike on Twitter and the employee was summarily brought before HR.
But monitoring for life doesn't seem feasible. But they don't really have to. Just making people believe they can be penalized at any time can change their behavior.
the constitution is a set of laws for lawmakers. It doesn't govern what people or companies do. Try reading one sometime. You might see one start with "Congress shall make no law..".
> Good luck monitoring that enforcing that
Unenforceable rules still have plenty of value in something called a "chilling effect" which people - even fully aware of an unforceable law - will still alter their behavior out of fear that they could somehow become entangled in it anyway. They preempt decision-making for many people.
The first amendment restricts the government, not the people. If the people want to enter into such an arrangement, that is their right. This is just an NDA without an end.
There are some legal limits on this. Things like the rule against perpetuities limit any sort of forever construct. The interesting question is whether someone bound by such a contact in life can perhaps speak after death: A book written privately in life but published publicly after death. That might be a case where general legal principals would win out over a corporate NDA.
> 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
The contract does not attempt to modify the protection of your free speech rights from government interference, so no.
(“But a government apparatus would enforce the contract, and corporations are chartered by the government, and anyway what good is a system that protects rights from the government if lots of people end up losing them to powerful organizations anyway?” Yes, yep, mmm-hmm. Welcome to left-libertarianism.)
(And, as the other poster noted, this is Sweden anyway, so the US constitution and bill of rights is irrelevant anyway)
> “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.