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The history of liberty and its progress in America and elsewhere is often as much about controlling employers’ and other private power and its abuses as it is about controlling government and its power.
As a nonsmoker, I abhor smoking. And few if any of us would question employers’ prerogatives to regulate the conduct of employees while on duty and/or on employer premises, but we’re here dealing with an entirely different issue.
The notion that a private employer could lawfully act like an unaccountable, overreaching government by seeking to dictate these or any other personal choices I or anyone else might make while off duty and off employer premises has frightening implications for your, my, and everyone else’s freedom and privacy.
As with government, once private employers are allowed to dictate any one aspect of one’s private life, where does it stop?
So who does Westgate Resorts president and CEO David Siegel think he is? Is Westgate Resorts in America?
As Alexander Hamilton wrote over 200 years ago, the power over a person’s subsistence is a power over that person’s will.
Following Siegel’s and his company’s apparent “reasoning,” why not require employees and job applicants to submit to employer monitoring–don't laugh; the technology for this is already widely available!–of whatever they, even (indeed, especially) on their own time and off employer premises, read, watch, or listen to; who they associate with and what kinds of organizations they participate in; what Web sites they visit and what they send or receive online; and the like?
We can’t have employees who dare to write or read online or other letters like this one or otherwise explore, much less spread, ideas about “controversial matters” that the employer might not like, such as notions about fairer tax policies and a stronger “social safety net,” or–horror of horrors–about (gasp!) employees and job applicants actually having rights and about even daring to regulate business to stop privacy abuses, pay inequities, the destruction of health-care, pension, and other benefits, or the like, now, can we? Gotta protect that almighty bottom line and the freedom to select our employees and run our business as we see fit!
At the center of such out-of-control employers’ concerns over employees’ and applicants’ off-the-job lives, there seems to be an overreaching “need” to make sure that only the “right” types of people are hired, perhaps in the name of making sure employees have the “right” attitudes and, to use that now-favorite corporate buzz word, are a good “fit” (read: are sufficiently cowed and properly docile to accept existing abuses and any possible future ones the employer might decide to inflict).
In general, employees’ and job applicants’ activities outside of working hours and off employers’ premises are none of an employer’s business unless they pose an actual and substantial conflict of interest or otherwise materially and substantially impair one’s ability to do one’s job.
As National Workrights Institute legal director Jeremy Gruber has noted, the actions of certain employers pose grave dangers for our society, our freedoms, and for each of us. As he put it, employers who delve into our lives outside of work “are making decisions based on information not submitted by the employee or references. It is wholly unrelated to the employment relationship.”
What’s more, Gruber added, “The idea that when you hire someone, you should be able to look at every aspect of their personal life is completely at odds of how a democratic society should operate. It has huge consequences for freedom in this country, when people are afraid or are changing their behavior because of what a potential future employer might say or do.”
At least as scary as employer efforts to snoop into and regulate workers’ off-hours, off-premises activities such as smoking are cases where employers fire, demote, otherwise discipline, or refuse to hire people based on such irrelevant things as their off-hours political or social activities.
Employment discrimination based on one’s off-the-job political activities, indeed, seem to be rising to a level not known since the era of McCarthyism, with its blacklisting and “political clearances.” For example, as has been widely reported, including in a story on CBS’s _60 Minutes_, an Alabama woman, Lynne Gobbell, was in 2004 fired from her job at a manufacturing plant for having a John Kerry bumper sticker on her personal car. (After the case made world headlines, she was offered a job–indeed, one with health insurance–by the Kerry campaign, but few employees thus treated are that fortunate.)
As a longtime political activist, I myself have found that many people, especially in today’s job-scarce economy, are now hesitant to take part in *any* form of political activism–writing a letter to a newspaper, calling a radio talk show, posting something on the Internet, taking part in a march or a rally–for fear that an employer might somehow frown on such actions. Today, the Internet and like means make it frighteningly easy for employers to snoop into job applicants’ or employees’ personal beliefs and activities.
This sleazy practice must be stopped through legislation like California’s, which specifically forbids employers from dictating or attempting to dictate employees’ political activity. Better yet, every state and Congress should adopt legislation, as a few states (including California, Colorado, and North Dakota) have, generally protecting the right of employees and job applicants to engage in any lawful off-hours, off-premises activities they choose without fear of employment discrimination.
Ironically, the fear that many workers now have of employment discrimination based on their political or other nonwork activities--"lifestyle discrimination"--is the very thing that keeps them from taking the steps, both as individuals and with others, to bring about an end to Siegel’s and related abuses. It is also a significant brake on long-needed, long-overdue social and economic progress in America–importantly, to efforts to stop this country’s headlong rush, especially under George W. Bush and his ilk, back to the days of Herbert Hoover–indeed, of William McKinley.
It is not so much about that oh-so-sacred bottom line as it is about power and control.
It is time to reclaim your and our rights–before they are lost forever, before we are all forced to live at the mercy of twits like David Siegel and other out-of-control employers in a nationwide or even worldwide Stepford, a massive, high-tech “company town” that controls not only our work tasks but our other actions, our minds, and our souls “24/7.”
As one person who responded elsewhere to Siegel’s actions asked, would Siegel and his company reject money if the investors who offered it were smokers? As others have noted, if he next decides not to hire or retain overweight people (apparently something lawful in most states), will such a diktat apply to him as well?
We, the people, must–and will–take back our privacy and our rights from out-of-control employers like Westgate Resorts and Siegel. I, for one, will do all I can to avoid purchasing his products and services, and I also will do all I lawfully can to make Siegel’s arrogance and stupidity known to others–and urge others to take his actions into account when themselves deciding whose products and services to buy and use.
Meanwhile, those of you who live in Florida need to contact your state legislators and your governor some time this week and urge them to adopt legislation that would protect people from employment discrimination based on lawful activities undertaken by employees or job applicants during nonworking hours and off employer premises. Get at least 10 other Floridians you know to do the same--this week.
Remember--without such legislation, you and your job could be next!
Scott Enk
Wisconsin
(where state law generally bans employment discrimination on account of use or nonuse of lawful products during nonworking hours and off employer premises!)
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Westgate Resorts
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