Adam Smith appears to have been caught on the wrong side of supply side economics. After the chief financial officer posted a video (below) of himself confronting a minimum wage worker at a drive thru window, his Tucson medical manufacturing company Vante fired him. The question is whether a protest that occurs outside business hours should be the grounds for dismissal.
Smith drove up to order a free cup of water to harass the company for its position on gay rights. In picking up the water, he proceeded to lecture the young person in window.
Most people agree that Smith was being a bit of a jerk to dress down the young lady in the drive thru. After all, this is not her policy and she remained calm and polite through the confrontation. I thought it was a bit boorish and if anything was likely to incur more sympathy for the company. I am not sure what Smith thought he was achieving by first lecturing the worker and then posting it on YouTube. I found it a bit over-the-top for a CFO of a company to tell a minimum wage worker that “I don’t know how you live with yourself and work here.”
It appears that CEO Roger Vogel had equal problems with the encounter and cashiered Smith. Vogel stressed “we hope that the general population does not hold Mr. Smith’s actions against Vante and its employees.” Smith had already removed the video before his termination but it did not help.
We have been dealing with an array of cases where employees — often public employees like teachers and police officers — are fired for their outside activities and associations. It is a highly problematic trend.
I tried to find how Smith was identified as part of this company. That would seem a key issue. If the company fired him upon learning of his participation in a protest, it would raise many of the same issues in the prior cases. Yet, from the company’s standpoint, he elected to post the video and, in so doing, threatened a backlash against the company. It is simple business. The company did not want to lose customers based on the conduct of one of its employees. From a free speech angle, private companies are not limited by the first amendment in such actions since the Constitution protects us against government denials of free speech. However, there remains the public policy question of the right of employees to engage in expressive speech. As a senior member of the company, Vogel clearly views this action as threatening a serious backlash from customers.
What do you think?
Source: Fox
Woah! I’m really digging the template/theme of this website. It’s simple,
yet effective. A lot of times it’s tough to get that “perfect balance” between superb usability and visual appeal. I must say you’ve done a very good job with this.
Additionally, the blog loads extremely quick for me on Opera.
Exceptional Blog!
Be careful which spring you get your water from. It might be contaminated. And pay a premium price for it.
Oddly enough, the question of whether people should be fired for their activities outside workplace is the same issue which sparked the protests, boycotts, and Appreciation Day
gbk:
“This is only so because you, and many others of your ilk, see no other options but the zero-sum of cultural encounters, and if one doesn’t think like you they are fools.”
I am quite cosmopolitan in my views on certain things, in fact on most things. I am a live and let live individual except when I am forced to do something which is against my personal belief.
If you want to be a socialist by all means, please start a commune or move to a state and become a socialist state; long live difference. But do not make me part of the calculus, do not force me to become a socialist.
If you want to cover everyone’s medical care then by all means enter into an association of like minded individuals and create an insurance company which is low cost and does the things you want it to do such as accepting people with preexisting conditions. And charge a small fee to those people who are unable to afford care.
If you dont like people consuming large quantities of corn or sugar, open a market or a restaurant which doesnt sell items with corn or sugar. Educate your customers to the benefits of healthy eating, dont make me unable to purchase a large soda if I choose to do so.
If you dont like Wall St. start a competing market, they are owned by individuals after all.
My “ilk” considers individual liberty to be sacrosanct, your ilk cannot say the same.
Much of life can only go on if we indulge (as it were) in tolerating/accepting cognitive dissonance.
Pete said: i don’t minister. but i have given food, water and clothing to those who needed
Pete, That is ministering, much more helpful and loving then just words. Esp since many who call themselves Christians, or people of any Faith, for that matter, think words are sufficient (and judgements, as with the issue of the thread) but do not bother to put the commandment to love one another, which I assume is, in one or another, part of any Faith, into action
lottakatz, great link there is currently 38,000 responses to it.
How entirely absurd that the american public (in micro) is “voting” over a human rights issue by what choice of chicken sandwich they eat.
“Waiting For Pollo” by Samuel Bucket- o-chicken