I don’t know what the labor laws are in Alabama, but I suspect that Lynne Gobbell has little recourse to having been fired for having a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker on her car.
“We were going back to work from break, and my manager told me that Phil said to remove the sticker off my car or I was fired,” she said. “I told him that Phil couldn’t tell me who to vote for. He said, ‘Go tell him.’ “
She went to Gaddis’ office, knocked on the door and entered on his orders. “Phil and another man who works there were there,” she said. “I asked him if he said to remove the sticker and he said, ‘Yes, I did.’ I told him he couldn’t tell me who to vote for. When I told him that, he told me, ‘I own this place.’ I told him he still couldn’t tell me who to vote for.”
Gobbell said Gaddis told her to “get out of here.” “I asked him if I was fired and he told me he was thinking about it,” she said. “I said, ‘Well, am I fired?’ He hollered and said, ‘Get out of here and shut the door.’ “
She said her manager was standing in another room and she asked him if that meant for her to go back to work or go home. The manager told her to go back to work, but he came back a few minutes later and said, ” ‘I reckon you’re fired. You could either work for him or John Kerry,’ ” Gobbell said.
Which is just stupid on Gaddis’ part, no matter how much of a Bush partisan he may be. The question, though, from a technical standpoint, is not whether Gaddis can fire someone for having a particular political opinion (something I’ve rarely seen covered as a protected status, and assuming that Alabama is an at-will employment state) but whether he can control the appearance of private vehicles in the company parking lot. That might be more legally defensible on his part, though still ethically dubious. (To take a more extreme case, though, could an employer require someone with a huge motorhome that said “KERRY KILLS BABIES” with a large image of an aborted fetus on it to not park in the company lot?)
Still, it’s a stupid and uncivil act on his part, and he should be ashamed of himself.
(via Les)
Yet another reason not to put bumper stickers on your car.
The site that I read this story on this morning is sending Geddis (misspelled in the story) a case of Kerry bumper stickers. Alabama is yet another stupid “right-to-be-under-paid” state, so I don’t think she’ll be able to pursue this matter with the EEOC.
Hopefully the Kerry people in Alabama hear about this and hire her for the campaign (“this is the face of the Bush boom”), or a Democrat business owner will hire her.
At least she isn’t like some of the stories in the news about car vandalization, being run off the road, of being beaten up all because of Dean, and/or Kerry bumper stickers.
At the Flats we had a guy that had the “Psychiatry Kills” placards, or the aborted Fetus placards (depending on the week) mounted in his truck bed, nothing was ever done about it. But it was a government owned site, so maybe there were different rules regarding such things. I know that religion was heavily protected, and those may have fallen under that category.
Ah. Yeah, religious belief is an EEOC-protected category, and, esp. on federal property, it would be a lot more difficult to do (it being federal could bring up issues of free speech, too). On private property, for a non-protected category, in an at-will state — probably SOL.
It would certaily be clever for the local Kerry campaign to hire her.
Taking donations for her here
http://nftunderground.blogspot.com/2004/09/vote-for-bush-or-youre-fired.html
Kerry picks her up http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2106714& “target=”new”> huzzah!
Good for him. (And an interesting Salon piece.)