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X illegally fired employee who publicly challenged return-to-work plans
- yieldcrv 3y agommm organizing to challenge return to office policies, the NLRB says this suggests a theoretical way to override at-will employment by saying you were organizing in some way?
- Afforess 3y agoYes, if it’s in good faith and you can prove it. The way this was phrased implies bad faith. Courts care very much about intent.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bugglebeetle 3y agoYou can’t fire people for organizing their workplaces. This has been established law for 80 years.
- financypants 3y agoBut can’t employers say there was “no reason” for firing someone organizing? Does participating in that provide short term job protection?
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoThey can say the moon is made of cheese, but what's the court going to believe? The court decides what is more plausuble
- bugglebeetle 3y agoWell, that and the NLRB.
- Zigurd 3y agoYou just gave an example of the "cleverness trap" to which the tech industry is especially susceptible. Good laws are written to avoid what could be called legal "hacks." If it looks like workers coordinating, it is. If it looks like they got fired for it, that's illegal.
- dragonwriter 3y agoWell, its not really theoretical that "at-will" employment means that termination is allowed by default (good cause is not required), but there are still prohibited "bad causes" (race, sex, labor organizing, etc.) Of course, the burden is on the complaining party to show the bad cause, its not simply a matter of assertion.
- jagged-chisel 3y agoI tend to phrase it: They can fire you for no reason. But if they give a reason, it best be a legal one. Of course, they can fire you for "no reason" when there's evidence there was a non-legal reason, and still be held accountable for an improper dismissal.
- happytoexplain 3y agoWell, lying is frowned upon, legally.
- jongjong 3y agoThat is just ridiculous. Even as an employee, I believe that the company should be allowed to fire whoever they want whenever they want without justification. The company is paying money, they should be allowed to stop paying that money whenever they want... Otherwise it's not really their money. I've been fired over things that were not my fault and I never complained. The monetary system which creates anti-competitive tech monopolies which makes it hard for people to start companies and find jobs should be fixed yes but that is a separate issue.
- clipsy 3y ago> I've been fired over things that where not my fault and I never complained. That's stupid, why would you choose to be a punching bag?
- jongjong 3y agoWhy would I want to work for a company that does not want me, does not value my skills and where I will not be given opportunities to progress?
- kevingadd 3y agoThat's an argument for going and finding a new job, not an argument in support of your employer being able to treat you like a punching bag
- Volundr 3y agoFun fact, withholding promotion over an attempt to organize is also illegal. And in answer to your question... to feed yourself and your family?
- jongjong 3y agoOh please as if that would even make it in front of a judge. There is no way to prove that. They can say you're not a culture fit or something. There is no way that can be enforced. There are thousands of pretexts that can be used to justify a lack of promotions.
- 65 3y ago> return-to-work A subtle way to insinuate that working from home is somehow not working. That the only way to work is in an office.
- kevingadd 3y agoYeah, it's interesting that they accept the phrasing "return to work" here when "return to office" is commonly used and more accurate
- postalrat 3y ago[flagged]
- junon 3y ago[citation needed]
- postalrat 3y agohttps://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/working-paper/evolution-working-home https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/working-paper/evolut... The reality is even worse. You think business want to pay for office space and lose employees trying to bring them back to the office? They don't. What they want is for things to get done and its not happening as it was before.
- joshxyz 3y agoshould be rto return to office. return to work is hilarious.
- oconnore 3y ago, NLRB alleges
- ShamelessC 3y agoOh so even more likely then!
- oconnore 3y agoI'm not sure what your point is. It's important that reporting is accurate, and the judicial system has not even held a hearing on this yet, though you wouldn't know that by the title here.
- anoxor 3y agoSuper deceptive title then.
- ShamelessC 3y agoGod forbid people be expected to read the article's they comment on. In any case, moderation or OP edited the title from what is on cnbc. Finally, to answer your question - I trust the NLRB, and I distrust Elon Musk. The court of public opinion doesn't require me to sit around and wait for a proper verdict when I can put two and two together myself. If it's found that X is in the right? You can correct me then. Would just like to add in an edit: why is this flagged? People need to relax a little.
- manonthewall 3y agoHN is full of a lot of what I call "unnecessary pedanticism". It's not really worth worrying about as the article title was cut short because of title size limits. It was a reasonable take on what to do in that circumstance.
- kcplate 3y agoI’m confused at how it is that people actually think that an employer doesn’t have the ability to dictate to its employees where their working location will be. They did it in early 2020 when they sent us all home. You are not forced to work at the location they specify—your employment in the US is always at will, so just quit and find another gig that suits you.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoThe person wasn’t fired for refusing to work in a specific location, but organizing their coworkers against resigning in the face of various abuses and a de facto layoff. The latter is protected under US labor law while the former (depending on the circumstances or terms of their employment) is generally not.
- kevingadd 3y agoIf your employer made promises about work location and/or work hours, they can't just suddenly go back on those promises and demand that you immediately upend your entire life to comply. Even if your employment agreement said they are allowed to do that, it may not be legally enforceable. What they can definitely do is say "anyone who can't show up to work in this office is getting laid off", and then perform a mass layoff in compliance with the law (N days advance notice and/or severance, etc). Claiming that if you choose to dance to a puppeteer's tune no matter what kind of demands they make on short notice you have "effectively resigned" is not a healthy employee/employer relationship and any boss doing that should expect to get harassed by the NLRB. This is all separate from the question of whether X retaliated against people for organizing, which is definitely an illegal thing to do.
- postalrat 3y agoOf course they can. Just the same as you can quit and expect them to go through the trouble of finding someone to replace you.
- kevingadd 3y agoThat is an individual one on one decision to terminate employment, which is different from a company wide email telling dozens or hundreds of people that they have "effectively resigned".
- kevingadd 3y agoIt seems unambiguous that it was possible for X to get away with doing this if they were slightly less aggressive about it - set a reasonable RTO timeline instead of demanding people show up immediately, not go on witch hunts by scanning slack messages, etc. But X's new owner loves drama and wants to feel powerful, so we get this. On the other hand you could also argue that they did get away with it, because multiple years of legal battles with the NLRB don't really count as much of a loss unless they result in big enough penalties to actually hurt the people who made these decisions.
- financypants 3y agoAll the best entrepreneurs love drama and want to feel powerful right
- manonthewall 3y agoThere is definitely a correlation between being psychopathic and CEO. I don't know if either is a direct result of the other or if it's a third quality, but the statistical correlation is certainly there and has been known for a while.
- Zigurd 3y agoYes, they could have not antagonized people, but that's not the problem. The problem is they fired workers for coordinating. In this case it was about RTO but it could have been about coordinating about anything, even a triviality. Workers have the right to coordinate, organize, and act together, formally or informally.
- bamazizi 3y agoI can't stand the X name! Twitter was more than a name/product. What's the catch phrase for "tweet this" or "someone tweeted me that" in X? "X this" or "someone X'd me that"? so awkward! *edit: came to comment on employee handling fiasco but got distracted with the name *Second edit: Wrote "twit" instead of "tweet". Out of sight, out of mind I guess!
- tough 3y agoI like to resort to the portmanteau xeet for those occasions, I see it as my own little futile act of rebellion against the branding upgrade.
- tough 3y agoFunny how it sounds like -shit- mentally, hahaha
- rnikander 3y agoI don't like it either. It also seems arrogant to me – something about squatting on an entire letter and trying to rebrand it for your company.
- labster 3y agoThe name X is more appropriate, because pretty soon the company will soon be dead enough to have cartoon Xes for eyes.
- bamazizi 3y agoX will be AXed indeed
- talldatethrow 3y agoYou think the name is so important, yet after a decade you wrote twit and twitted... When it's actually tweet and tweeted. Shows you how subjective it all is that after a decade at the top of mind people can still get it wrong.
- karaterobot 3y agoFlagged because the title of the post is missing a key verb phrase.
- 7e 3y agoFlag the entire site for enforcing a very short headline length limit, like it's 1978 and we're reading it on an 80 character teletype. Must be a LISP thing.
- Freedom2 3y agoFlag this comment for going against the "HN is the greatest" dogma
- theGeatZhopa 3y agoFlag this whole thread for misusing the flagging and also called the police to file a report on this. Expect some blue letters the next days, flaggers
- karaterobot 3y agoI wish I could flag the entire site; alas, I cannot.
- yalogin 3y agoWhat happened to all the severance that Musk did not dole out? On a related note, musk seems like an impossible guy to work for. He is super opinionated and does things on a whim over tweet, does not treat employees properly, over works them and there is proof that he doesn’t even give severance to fired employees. Why do people work for him, specifically Twitter? I can see he allure behind Tesla and spacex even though I heard similar stories from there
- ethbr1 3y agoThe problem with being brilliant is that you don't develop a good litmus test for the rare times when you're not right. Or as Elon put it, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4xIwP-65oD0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4xIwP-65oD0
- ttfkam 3y agoRare?
- meepmorp 3y agoSure, he occasionally does the wrong thing but you're missing the context for all the times he's right. Nobody gives him credit for putting his shoes on the correct feet or remembering to get dressed after showering rather than before.
- ethbr1 3y agoI think it's a bit unobjectively critical to suggest that Elon Musk doesn't make a lot of good decisions. Either that or he's the luckiest person on the planet.
- rsynnott 3y agoOf course, doing stupid things is also the problem with being stupid; Occam’s Razor probably points more to stupidity than brilliance in this instance.