John Locke you are the perfect example why even when republicans can prove they often have the better ideas, and win in landslides(Reagan, the Gingrich Contract on America) the "Conservatives" will always falter and fail and inevitably lose popular support.
I even agree with you, but to put it simply your lack of compassion is alarming. I doubt you're an unpleasant person. But to put it simply you come off just a bit too cold hearted and married a wee bit too firmly to textbook political theory. You lack the human element. (Which is why Libertarians will never become an actual political force in this country)
She was fired for a bumper sticker on her car.
Not for trying to pass out pamphlets on the clock. not for trying to paper the walls of the facility with Kerry election posters.
She was fired because she was a known supporter of John kerry and the Democrats.
She was fired because she refused to bow down and grovel to this man who used his power over her financial well being-- the very sustenance of her life-- to coerce, force,and bully her to accept his point of view.
He in effect made it clear that it was His way or the unemployment line. not just to her BUT to every employee in the place.
A more foul evil than your fear about property rights.
Is it strapping a bomb to your chest and stepping on a bus or kidnapping people and threatening to kill them if you don't get your way? Obviously not. It is however a distant relative.
If you take a moment you might remember we did indeed fight a war about this. It wasn't ALL about taxes and property rights. it was also about not being under the gun to accept someone else's whim.
(By the way, is it HIS property or does he rent? Many businesses do you know, often cheaper, so would that change the equation in this--as an aside?)
I am not supporting the government and it supposed ability to tell us what we can or cannot do, but at the same time this is the same sort of injustice as your fear

How about the government not being able to protect us from the tyranny of those with power? Or even the power of a citizen to be free from coersion and threats/
For in essense you are placing her in the position of being property. She needs the job to survive. You think he was unaware of that when he decided to play Mine is Bigger Than Yours?--which is kinda sad since he's playin against a woman who technically isn't qualified to compete in that regard.

BoF's point is a good one


I agree that no person or organization(government, religion, the Shriners) should be able to tell an individual what one can or cannot do with their property, but is what occured in Alabama not the same thing Mr. Locke?
The devil is in the details, and to just brush this off so easily as "his property he is god," is a fatal mistake, for you open the door to tyranny widely, and with a freshly brushed doormat.


True, taking away his right to do with his property as he sees fit is a great danger, but does not his action also qualify as, or even rank higher as a betrayal to a person's rights in regards to property of one's self?
Should tyranny be excused because one is on someone else's property?
Should property rights trump the rights of the individual?


Ah hobbes beat me to the point! i need to type faster.




Do you want to live in an Economy or a Society?

Christopher I'm going to make it a point not to reply to most of your post, not because I didn't enjoy it but I feel I have addressed most of those concerns already and don't want to rehash how I feel about those other points.

What I would like to look at is this part of your post....


I agree that sometimes I come off cold hearted, but I hope it's only because of how impersonal reading a board is rather than in proper speech where we could look each other in the eye as two men or two people.

Regretably, I know I can come off like that here. But believe me when I tell you that I am not cold hearted. I just feel that the government has no authority in this matter. To me the issue at hand is that for whatever reason, her employer didn't like her and decided to end her employment.

I have to be honest, but I didn't want to say this earlier. She sounds like she asked for it. She kept asking him "Am I fired?". Over and over. To me she was pushing his buttons getting smart with him "you can't tell me who to vote for"... he clearly wasn't telling her who to vote for. She sounds like she asked for it and got what she deserved. The situation could have been handled better, but in the end only one thing matters. It is his business and he has the right to terminate. That's why I encourage everyone to walk the line with their employers.

If I walk around giving flippant attitude to my boss, he'd better fire me. Or worse off have everbody else doing it soon too.

This comment right here was key to me:


As though he was prepared for a firey quip from her. As though she'd made trouble in the past.

It's an employee's duty to keep their job, not the governments.

Up to what point? When they actually do start telling us who to vote for or else?

I liked the idea of putting Kerry stickers on every car in the parking lot, then let him contemplate firing his entire workforce or giving her back her job. That would have been poetic justice, however oddly a few people seem to think this kind of tyranny is acceptable when they have their partisan blinders on and would not have used the moment to correct a terrible wrong.

I have to go with, its her property not his. I bet she wins in court.

I apologize john locke. i tried to be clear that i wasn't condemning you as a bad type of person. i didn't do it well enough.
that is my frustration with the Republicans and the Libertarians coming thru. great on paper but always sounding like the puritan preacher.
To me the ideas the Dems have progressed for the last 40 years are horribly flawed, but damn if they don't sound so good. Conservatives always seem to come off like they're ready to take your children away.
Was she annoying-- probably
is the boss a weenie-- probably.

But the resounding image falls towards the evil bossman.
While defense of private property must be vigorously defended.
While the freedom to hire and fire must also,
I am simply of the opinion that the defense of the individual against those with power must always come first unless the individual is completely in the wrong.

The Alabama case sounds like the result of a long day, a hard work week and some frustration that boiled over. add in 2 opiniated and antagonistic personalities and
BAM
Flash fire everybody duck and cover.

Again i meant no offense

No job is worth your dignity as a human being. You can always find another job. Giving someone power over you and how you chose to live your life is not worth a paycheck.

The right to hold your own political perspective is a basic right and I would never barter it away so someone can feel superior to me. I have a Kerry/Edwards sign on my lawn. Is that any business of my supervisor? No. I have a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker on my car. That's none of my supervisor's business either.

I do not have any Kerry/Edwards signs, bumper stickers, buttons or other materials at my work station. That would be unprofessional to my mind because now I am moving into an area where it would be my boss's business. While we can all wear our political allegiance on our sleeve on a board like this it would be improper to assume they would be welcomed in a working environment.

The boss can suggest if he choses to that the employee should vote for a certain candidate. The employee has every right to ignore that advice without suffering any sanction for doing so.

Just because someone pays you for the physical and mental labor you produce doesn't mean they get to buy your soul as well.

That's all very well, but what property rights are infringed by simply having to have a contract?

It doesn't have to be drafted by government - if the employer wants to have the right to fire employees at will for putting a political bumper sticker on their own car then leaving it in the corporate parking lot - they would be allowed to do so. Subject to them agreeing, of course, and if they didn't and it was a big sticking point for him, he could just not hire them in the first place and get someone else who did. (Since the US jobs market is obviously so uniformly buoyant that both employers and employees can find another suitable job at a day's notice, which seems to be the assumption behind the "if she doesn't like it she can go somewhere else" line of argument. If it's true, good for you. Not only do ou have 100% employment and a completely mobile and flexible workforce for whom money is not an issue, you also have the first recorded real-world example of a perfect market.)

Heck, a valid contract of employment could say nothing more than "By taking this job, the employee agrees that the employer can do whatever they want and the employee has to go along with all of it, no matter how arbitrary or inconsistent. If the employee ever refuses, they are subject to dismissal." Indeed, this line of thinking could be seen as profoundly libertarian - government's only role would be to check that contracts comply with the laws on race, gender, etc. If the contracts do comply, any legal actions become civil ones for breach of contract - getting government out of a whole area of business life. If an employer is too dumb to explicitly prohibit theft of company property as grounds for dismissal and prosecution, more fool them. If an employee signs up to a contract that doesn't explicitly make health and safety at work a responsibility of the employer, and they fall of a ladder at work, tough. What should government poke their nose into such matters? I don't subscribe to this view myself, but I can imagine a world where the ONLY interaction between government and employment is insistence on contracts of employment - surely a more libertarian and constitutionally-compliant situation than now? But I digress...

More usefully, the employer might, for instance, want to get the employee to agree to a minimum notice period if they choose to leave, to give them time to find & hire a suitable replacement. That's not an infringement of property rights, it's common sense.

Contracts are two-way documents that are entered into voluntarily by both parties. Government sets down the laws under which they are drafted and enforced, but it doesn't say what the terms & conditions that go into them have to be, and it's the terms and conditions that put constraints on the parties' rights, not the existence of the contract in itself.

I just can't help thinking that spelling out to people before you employ them exactly what "rights" they have, and do not have, while they are working for you is a good idea for employer AND employee. It can't be good practice for both parties to be so uncertain of one another that they spend all their time guessing which minor irrelevancies the other party will see as unacceptable, instead of getting on with productive business, can it? I mean, don't you think this guy's other employees must be somewhat distracted from the day job at the moment, knowing that one of their colleagues has been fired over something so petty?

Such thinking would likely have saved this employer a lot of time and money which he's now going to have to spend defending this woman's court action. Not to mention the bad publicity he's getting for it.

I just don't see how a government requirement to have contracts, with no prescriptions about what must be in them, qualifies as telling people what to do with their property, and, even if it does, could be seen as an unreasonable restraint.

This is true...but isn't that what the Policies and Procedures manual does? Which probably belongs in the new thread on the topic of Employee Rights...but becomes relevant to this topic in a couple of different ways. Was their a policy against bumper stickers? Was their a policy against political campaigning in the workplace (and, if so, didn't the boss violate it)? Was their a policy for job performance review that should have been followed before any termination? Hmmmm......



This is true, but common sense has to enter in somewhere as well. Almost everyone has to sacrifice some part of their dignity at some point on the job. But there definitely should be a line that shouldn't be crossed.




I think there is probably something to this. Somehow, I don't really see this situation escalating to that level so quickly unless there was a past history. For example....how did someone even notice she had a bumper sticker on her car in the first place...I walk by the same cars everyday in the parking lot...danged if I could tell you if any of them had a bumper sticker on them. Not that I think this necessarily excuses the actions of the boss, but I do think there is probably a lot to this situation that we don't know about.

Emphasis mine.


Emphasis yours.

At least you understand this isn’t a black and white issue, that there is need for the gray of the government.

I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a good thing I can’t setup a business next door to yours and start burning coal without scrubbers on my stacks, burn used tires, dump my mercury in your drinking water or leave my byproducts out in the open whose obnoxious and potentially hazardous odor could drift onto your property and among other things keep customers from visiting your company. Zoning and OSHA regulations are there for the good of ALL enterprise and hopefully you’ll agree.

Which is what I don’t understand.



So in essences your saying (not trying to put words in your mouth but trying to follow your logic) that is perfectly OK for the government to step in for the safety of employees, the protection of the environment and to promote the healthy growth of ALL business interest, but in the land of generous political freedoms, because an employee doesn’t agree politically with their boss, they can be fired.

In a time of so much political correctness, this is as politically incorrect as one could imagine.

If I purchased product from this company I would be looking elsewhere and my guess is she'll be vindicated in court.

Please don't take offense at this, but I would argue otherwise. The last line to me, exactly states that a business would be hurt by an employee with an "offensive" bumper-sticker.



How does this line state that a company would not be hurt?



Yes, your right to property and privacy would outweigh my first amendment rights to impose upon you on your land. At the same time, an employer is told by the government what he/she can and cannot do. The constitution DOES apply to having the people follow basic rights. The government tells the employer that at a minimum, a set wage must be paid. The government tells the employer that he/she cannot sexually harass an employee. The government tells the employer that he/she cannot discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or handicap if the person is qualified. The government tells the employer that employees have the right to organize and to enter into collective bargaining agreements if so desired. The constitution applies to people just as much as it does to government. The preceding examples show that clearly.