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Complain About Comcast, Get Fired From Your Job
ub3r n3u7r4l1st writes When you complain to your cable company, you certainly don't expect that the cable company will then contact your employer and discuss your complaint. But that's exactly what happened to one former Comcast customer who says he was fired after the cable company called a partner at his accounting firm. Be careful next time when you exercise your first amendment rights. From the article:
At some point shortly after that call, someone from Comcast contacted a partner at the firm to discuss Conal. This led to an ethics investigation and Conal’s subsequent dismissal from his job; a job where he says he’d only received positive feedback and reviews for his work.
Comcast maintained that Conal used the name of his employer in an attempt to get leverage. Conal insists that he never mentioned his employer by name, but believes that someone in the Comcast Controller’s office looked him up online and figured out where he worked.
When he was fired, Conal’s employer explained that the reason for the dismissal was an e-mail from Comcast that summarized conversations between Conal and Comcast employees.
But Conal has never seen this e-mail in order to say whether it’s accurate and Comcast has thus far refused to release any tapes of the phone calls related to this matter.
It depends on the state. In many states, an employer can fire you for any reason or no reason at all (with exception of legally protected statuses that cannot be used in hiring/firing decisions such as race, age, gender, etc).
Actually right to work is exactly like it sounds. You have the right to work without paying to join a union.
No, right to work means you don't have to join a union, and any provisions that you sign on your hiring contract that restrict where you can work are unenforceable. An example of this are non-compete clauses, where a company says you can't work for a company that is a competitor for one year after leaving the company. In right to work states, this is can not be enforced.
Right-to-work law
A "right-to-work" law is a statute in the United States that prohibits union security agreements, or agreements between labor unions and employers, that govern the extent to which an established union can require employees' membership, payment of union dues, or fees as a condition of employment, either before or after hiring. Right-to-work laws do not aim to provide general guarantee of employment to people seeking work, but rather are a government regulation of the contractual agreements between employers and labor unions that prevents them from excluding non-union workers, or requiring employees to pay a fee to unions that have negotiated the labor contract all the employees work under.
At-will employment
At-will employment is a term used in U.S. labor law for contractual relationships in which an employee can be dismissed by an employer for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning. When an employee is acknowledged as being hired "at will", courts deny the employee any claim for loss resulting from the dismissal. The rule is justified by its proponents on the basis that an employee may be similarly entitled to leave his or her job without reason or warning. In contrast, the practice is seen as unjust by those who view the employment relationship as characterized by inequality of bargaining power.
Natural monopolies, which utility services belong to, absolutely are a product of capitalism, and they require regulation to prevent predatory practices due to their position in the market as a natural monopoly. One of the biggest issues with the Austrian school of economics is that they ignore the mathematical proof of certain monopolies being more efficient than a competitive market.
I'm a firm believer in the power of capitalism as the most efficient market-sorting mechanism out there, but in order for it to work correctly, one needs to recognize the areas where it breaks down, either due to unlimited demand as in a health care market, which is effectively buying life, on which there is no price too great to overcome the natural will to live, or natural monopolies where first to market/mass market is more efficient due to the significant infrastructure (and therefore capital costs) necessary to compete.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
Many states are "right to work" states, which actually means the opposite of what it sounds like. In those states, you can be fired for any reason or no reason, so long as if there is a reason, it is not an illegal one. That is, you cannot be fired based on your ethnicity, for example. (At least in theory.)
Utah is a "right to work" state (unions are outlawed by state constitution). However, it is our status as a "work at will" state which means that either party can sever the contract for any reason (or no reason!).
You're confusing "Right to Work" with "At will emplyment". This is understandable since most states that are right to work are also at will employment states, but strictly speaking the two are distinct.
Ah bullshit, but thanks for playing.
We have unions in Denmark and you can fire people easy enough. And then there are countries like France, where you can't fire people at all, not thanks to unions.
The unions in the US have way too much power, and that is a business stifling problem; but that doesn't mean unions are a bad thing.
In "right to work" states, you can fire someone for no reason at all, but even in these states, if you cite a reason, everything changes.
"Right to work" laws govern whether unions can force employees in an organized company to pay dues even if they do not want to be a member of the union. This has nothing directly to do with at will employment which applies to every worker not covered under a contractual agreement (including union contracts) stipulating conditions for termination. At will employment means you can be fired for any reason or no reason at all unless it impacts your status as a protected class.
Which is the opposite of states such as California and New York. My sister occasionally worked as an extra on a daytime-drama filmed in Manhattan (New York). Upon her sixth engagement, she was met by the union steward and told that if she were to return again she would have to present her Screen Actors Guild card or he would shutdown production for the day. Yearly membership cost approximately 6 days of pay. When the director invited her back, they agreed to pay her membership dues so that she could return as an extra again. Guild membership gave here nothing more than the privilege of a couple more days of uncredited extra work. If you got to another occupation that has union involvement, you have to join that union too.
This is what it means when a state does not have Right-To-Work legislation.
You actually mean "at will employment" where they can terminate your employment for any reason.
However, this gets further confused when you consider "termination for cause" -- are they firing you just to terminate your employment or is there some rationale for termination like insubordination, unexcused absences, criminal activity.
Most employers don't like terminating employment without cause because employees are often eligible for unemployment insurance which impacts their employer's premiums.
The unions in the US have way too much power
LOL! Union participation is at an all time low, other than police and sometimes fire unions the public unions have been destroyed or weakened to the point of irrelevance. Heck, even the UAW and Teamsters, some of the strongest unions historically have little power and have given up almost all protections for new members to keep some of the gains for past employees. I'm no lover of the UAW (actually, have many fun stories about how they messed up things for me when I worked for IBM) but even I will say that the idea that they have too much power today, or any time in the last decade or so is silly.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I think they are talking about Teacher's Unions like in NY, where they have dozens of teachers going to empty rooms all day to sit around and get paid because they can't fire them.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...