Fired for Wearing the Wrong Color Shirt: The Scary Truth About Our Lack of Workplace Protections

"Fired for Wearing the Wrong Color Shirt: The Scary Truth About Our Lack of Workplace Protections" - that's the headline over an article on "Alternet". It goes on to explain that American workers have almost no protection against being fired for any, or no, reason. The belief so many have that "the boss" can't just can them because he doesn't like, for example, their being left handed is WRONG. It's an "at will" country -- unless you are protected by a UNION.

We are so stupid, and have swallowed managements line of bull for too many years. When the light finally dawns, we are often "too old", seen as "troublemakers", and not listened to by our younger co-workers - who think stuff like, "times are different now", "that won't happen to me", etc., etc.

From my experience, the best way to beat that is to become a part of management. Then, when you are fired (after all, managers are often blamed for the failings of "executive suite" sorts) you have a decent chance of finding another job - unless you really are an eight-ball.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from the "Alternet" article -- please follow link to original.
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Fired for Wearing the Wrong Color Shirt: The Scary Truth About Our Lack of Workplace Protections
Most American workers labor under the auspices of employment-at-will, which allows employers to hire, fire and promote for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all.

On March 16, at least 14 employees of the Elizabeth R. Wellborn law firm, located in Deerfield Beach, Florida, wore orange shirts to work. For this style choice, they were marched into a conference room and summarily fired. Wellborn’s husband declared that the shirts were a protest against working conditions at the 275-worker law firm, and that management would not stand for such behavior. (Early reporting claimed the workers’ dress merely signified a way to easily organize a happy hour outing, although it later came out that while that was true for some, others were dressed in the color of prison uniforms to protest draconian new work rules.)

Aren’t such tyrannical, arbitrary and callous acts illegal? Can management just throw you out on your ear, upending your life and endangering your ability to support yourself, for wearing the wrong shirt? Freedom of speech, freedom of expression, right?

Wrong.

The First Amendment and many of the Constitution’s other protections only extend to the government, not to private employers. Freedom of speech and expression are not protected in the private-sector, nonunion workplace. You could be fired for, say, wearing a pin advocating a particular political party. You could also be fired for sporting a smiley face pin.

“People assume they have a lot more protection at work than they actually do,” says Judith M. Conti, federal advocacy coordinator for the National Employment Law Center (NELP). “People also assume they have some right to be treated decently, and fairly, and respectfully at the workplace. They have the right to freedom from discrimination based on certain immutable characteristics like sex, race and age, but as long as treatment at work isn’t related to one of those characteristics you can be treated badly with no legal recourse. It’s kind of a free-for-all.”

According to Donna Ballman, the labor lawyer six of the Wellborn employees have retained, the workers had no idea their jobs could be imperiled by their choice of clothing color. “Who would?” Ballman responded in an email message. “Most Americans think your employer must have a good reason to fire you.”

But for the most part, American workers labor under the auspices of employment-at-will, a doctrine that allows employers near total control to hire, fire and promote, for good reasons, bad reasons or no reason at all. Employment-at-will is a principle that dates back to British common law, which early settlers brought with them from the Old World during the Colonial era. It is a relic of that time and has long since been overturned in Britain, along with the rest of the world’s wealthy nations.

In America well over three-quarters of workers are covered by employment-at-will, with Montana (with a population of less than one million) being the only state with a law requiring employers to have “reasonable grounds” for laying people off. Outside of Montana, a union is the surest protection against employment-at-will’s regimen of near total employer power. (Only a tiny sliver of American workers belong to a union: at last count 7.2 million in the private sector, or 6.9 percent of the workforce.) ..............................
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Please follow link for the rest of the article.