143 Replies to “He Who Clucks Last . . .”

  1. This is just one of the many things liberals/leftists should be batted over the head with. Their gamble that this chicken restaurant was pin to pop the delicate bubble that is Western civilisation was as surefire as a snowball in hell.

  2. ET, you make an excellent point re one time at an excited moment vs. a pattern of behaviour.
    Who knows, maybe he was doing a poor job or someone in management had an ongoing grudge with him and this was the excuse they needed to get rid of him.

  3. I think that, as a commenter posted at the Legal Insurrection site, that a more viable response of the company would have been to put out a public statement that this employee’s actions do not represent the views of the company.
    This is comical, a professor advising on how to run a company. They don’t have ‘tenure’, ya know…the consequences of free speech are a function of free speech in the real world.
    The company advised him he was fired. Free speech.

  4. EBD – I actually agree with you that employers should be free to hire and fire, but only with regard to work issues.
    That is, if the employer decides that a work requirement is that his restaurant staff be blonde and dressed in a bikini, then, that’s an agreement between the employer and the employee.
    But when that same employee is off-site and on his own personal time, then, I don’t think that the employer has any rights of overseeing his activities. And that includes his being a jerk.

  5. An executive’s personal time ceases to be personal when he posts youtube video of himself shouting down a teenaged minimum wage worker over her employer’s thought crimes.

  6. I don’t feel much sympathy for him, because it seems to me that he wouldn’t have minded getting her fired.

  7. Just for the sake of argument, ET, suppose a company found out that their Senior VP of Operations had been publishing online videos showing him deliberately frightening seniors in a park by, say, standing a bit too close to them and staring at them in a creepy and vaguely threatening way, i.e. in a way that’s not technically illegal, but is clearly aggressive and rude. Would the company have no right to fire him because he was off-site, and was amusing himself that way on his own personal time?

  8. marco – I beg your pardon – “her employer’s thought crimes’? Are you seriously claiming that Cathy’s views on marriage are ‘thought crimes’?Whew; you sound like some authority from the Inquisition or Mao’s regime.
    EBD – if the Senior VP is being a public nuisance, then, this is no reason to fire him but it is reason to inform the police that he is harassing people and insist that he stop posting these online and to attend psychological counselling. He also has the right of refusal!
    That is, I don’t know if telling him to stop would do any good. Firing him probably wouldn’t make him stop. As you point out, it’s not actually illegal. If it were illegal, then it’s easy to fire him.
    My point is that an employer does not own an employee. I still think that the correct action in this harassment case would be a public statement by the company that this guy did not represent company behaviour. Leave the peer pressure against him from his colleagues and online to deal with him.

  9. Steve Burton –
    A suit was filed in Utah which attempts to break Utah’s statute forbidding bigamy, using a Federal court ruling on SSM: there’s no fearmongering in my statement, only facts. You clearly have not followed the American leftists on the Federal Bench – they impose the radical agenda, not work on the Constitution, common sense, decency, or any other basis. As soon as they have a SSM statute in their hands, they will extend it to polygamy, in the belief that it will help destroy the traditional culture of the US ( as SSM will ). There belief is that culture must be broken, as a prelude to the introduction of a dictatorship by the ” progressive ” left.
    Advocates of SSM in the US may pat themselves on the back for their ” tolerance”, but the revolutionary left looks at them as merely useful tools in their quest to subjugate the US by destroying its culture.

  11. Well yeah! That’s me, Marco the Maoist! Look man, this whole hooplah boils down to thought crime with freedom of speech as its manifestation.
    On your point of employee ownership: while an employer doesn’t own employees, they do own the money with which to pay them (the golden rule).

  12. Bruce: marco’s comment was in the wrong thread; it was a response to chutzpahticular’s comment (and link) in Reader Tips, so I moved it there.
    ET (11:01), I respectfully disagree. I think that character issues *are* a perfectly legitimate matter of concern for employers, and that the employers in my (admittedly over-the-top) hypothetical example would have every right – bordering on an obligation – to fire the fellow.
    I agree that an employer doesn’t own an employee, but neither does he owe him a living.

  13. So, the take out jerk got fired, well regardless of his actions, he should be allowed his opinion, even if he’s a knob. However, it sounds like he’s the kind of guy just begging for a kick in the nads. Personally, I think there’s a greater power at work, creating effing jerks, for not other reason than to provide a target for normal people to boot in the crotch.

  14. Agreed EBD. Employment is not a right. It is a mutual contract between the employer and the employee. If the employee doesn’t like what the employer does (s)he is free to seek employment elsewhere at any time. If it is good enough for one it is likewise good enough for the other. If the employee does something that the employer doesn’t like then the employer should be able to terminate the contract at anytime. That is not to say that the terms of the contract should not be fulfilled. The employee is entitled to any wages earned or separation owed based on the contract.

  15. ET, the employee went public for all to see and hear. I think this is what did him in. Not his views or his comment. Many companies, if not most, are very conscious these days of their public image and their employees project a company’s image.

  17. Captain Video got what was coming to him, the jerkoff. I love the karma $hitstorm that landed on this bozo/bullseye
    The FORMER Vante exec was so full of rightous indignation/hate himself, he forgot the first rule of dealing with the service industry; the dedicated little people keeping this society going:
    The cashier, hamburg flipper only works there. They don’t make policy.
    They provide labor. That’s it.
    The cashier deserves a Christmas card, she held up quite well. Give her HIS job.
    The genius probably went to Harvard too. They have the best pot you know….

  18. Do you think maybe he’s an ass at work too, and they were looking for a reason to cut him loose?
    Glad they cut him off at the knees ……..the prick.

  20. I still think that the correct action in this harassment case would be a public statement by the company that this guy did not represent company behaviour. Leave the peer pressure against him from his colleagues and online to deal with him.
    Yeah, the leftist solution, ‘peer pressure’ and a ‘strongly worded letter’. Chamberlain lives on… heh

  21. “As soon as they have a SSM statute in their hands, they will extend it to polygamy, in the belief that it will help destroy the traditional culture of the US ( as SSM will )”
    That’s why we should give in on the issue of SSM. Carefully craft the laws ourselves so that SSM ends with equivalent benefits to straight couples, and not let it extend to churches being forced to perform gay marriages or the law being “extended” to polygamy (again 2 different things, not sure how it could extend if the laws were made sensibly). By fighting against it we do two things: Increase our perception amongst the ignorant that we hate women and gays – and let the left craft all the laws and pass them – extending well beyond ssm to Obamacare and others. You may not agree with me, but I truely believe this issue has to die so we can fix everything else.

  22. Actually, Steve, there are already people not just agitating for polygamy, there are people who are agitating for extra-species “marriage”. And I’m not just talking about women in Tijuana who want to marry their donkeys.
    My concern about SSM is once you toss aside the idea that it’s between a man and a woman, where can you logically draw a line? After all, if there’s nothing special about sex, what’s so special about the number? Polygamy has been, and is being, practiced all over the world. From a biological perspective, polygamy is an imprecise method of natural selection; since the number of wives a man can have is usually dependent on his wealth/stature in the community, wealthier, more powerful men (who presumably have ‘stronger’ genes – yes, I realize that’s a huge presumption) get to have (in theory) more children. SSM doesn’t even have this small virtue.
    But once you erase the one man/one woman definition, by what logical basis would you bar other combinations? Forget plain old polygamy – what about 3 men with 8 shared wives, for example? (And wouldn’t that make a sitcom!) Once you erase the basic biological unit, everything else is arbitrary.
    And the reason I’m against SSM is simply money. The extension of spousal benefits will have huge costs. If polygamy is legalized – which it will have to be, if SSM becomes widely accepted – then what’s to stop a guy from hanging around cancer wards, ‘marrying’ old men so he can get their survivor benefits? Just the fact that I can think of it means it would certainly happen.
    Or, more prosaic: young guy with $500 needs $5,000 of dental work. ‘Marries’ friend who works at (say) Post Office, gives him $250 (which is more than PO guy had before), gets $5,000 of teeth (costs PO guy nothing), and uses the other $250 to pay for generic wedding/divorce fees. Who loses? I do, ’cause it’s going to cost me when I mail my next letter. And you can substitute IBM or the DMV for the Post Office – any institution that pays for extra staff benefits will incur extra costs.
    Now, if people want to co-habit, sign contracts with marriage like conditions, etc, that’s their business. But when the furtherance of their desires reaches into my pocketbook, I do have the right to protest, and I shall.

  23. “Or, more prosaic: young guy with $500 needs $5,000 of dental work. ‘Marries’ friend who works at (say) Post Office, gives him $250 (which is more than PO guy had before), gets $5,000 of teeth (costs PO guy nothing), and uses the other $250 to pay for generic wedding/divorce fees. Who loses? I do, ’cause it’s going to cost me when I mail my next letter. And you can substitute IBM or the DMV for the Post Office – any institution that pays for extra staff benefits will incur extra costs. ”
    What’s stopping straight non couples from doing this now? Loopholes have to be closed, which is why I suggest we get in power and we write the laws as opposed to letting the left do it and leave large loopholes in them.
    I do sort of see where you are coming from in regards to where do you draw the line. Our society, even supporters of ssm, draws the line at couples. Groups of 2. That’s where the line needs to be drawn. And it needs to be drawn very clearly, by us and not drawn by the left because they’ll draw a dotted line.
    You don’t want to extend benefits for financial reasons. That’s what gay couples want because we don’t see our relationships as any less valid than any other couple. But it’s all the word couple – nobody uses the word group in this. A large part of society frowns on same sex relationships but both sides of this issue frown on group relationships. The left may want to make polygamy a thing, but gays certainly don’t.

  24. “Our society, even supporters of ssm, draws the line at couples.”
    Except, increasingly, it doesn’t. This was an inevitable, perfectly predictable effect of Muslim immigration into the West. And the thing is, polygamy (from what I can tell) is much more normal in human history across different cultures than monogamy is. Gay marriage is historically unheard of because two men can’t produce a child, two women can’t produce a child. So which – gay “marriage” or polygamy – is more likely to flood our society eventually?
    Polygamy will be effectively legalized in North America in the next few years (I hope I’m wrong). BTW the collapse of the standard model of marriage is on the heads of heterosexual couples demanding access to no-fault divorce and so on (the person at the Post Office and his/her significant other shouldn’t be able to get away with that scam whatever the sex-combination).
    The above at the risk of repeating what KevinB’s already said.

  25. If the employee does something that the employer doesn’t like then the employer should be able to terminate the contract at anytime.
    What kind of nonsense is this?! If you work for me, and I’m a Yankee fan, and you show up for work wearing a Mets cap, I can fire you? You wear corduroy pants, and I don’t like the swishing sound they make as your fat thighs rub together, so I can fire you? You’re a Muslim, and I think they’re all filthy terrorists, so I can fire you?
    What a nasty, arbitrary, depressing little world you live in.

  26. Kevinb: So if I bang the boss’s daughter on my personal time he has no grounds to fire me? What part of PRIVATE OWNERSHIP is unclear?

  27. ET – He, Adam Smith, was the CFO of Vante Pharmaceuticals. His behavior can directly affect stock prices. If he had not been fired by the board, the stockholders would have demanded his firing. Executive Officers are held to a higher stand for this very reason.

  28. If it’s not the employer’s call, KevinB, then who, specifically, in your opinion, should get to decide what is and isn’t a legitimate reason for a private business owner to decide to no longer employ someone?
    It’s not a rhetorical question, btw, I’m genuinely curious as to what your answer might be.
    So, who gets to make the call?

  29. You know. I think this campaign against a Chicken franchise may have been the last straw for normal people. They have firmly drawn a line finally.Thats why liberals have gone nuts. They smell the change in the culture. The fact folks are fed up with these bozo’s.So much so A kid making points why not to vote for Obama is getting hundreds If not thousands of death threats by The ever tolerant liberal.
    People are sick to death of people telling them whats right or wrong. Only its not Church people but sanctimonious lefties who have no shame forcing their lifestyle on us no matter what. Forcing our children to be brainwashed by them. The hypocrisy alone is enough.
    What sticks I think in peoples throat is now these self proclaimed “progressives” think even chicken outlets need to be censored, let alone free speech.
    This is less about gays than its about free speech & private property. Something the left hates even more than their idea of Bigots. They should know being the biggest race baiter’s around.

  30. As I understand the Christian religion, it [the Constitution] was, and is, a revelation. – John Adams
    It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution. – James Madison
    For my own part, I sincerely esteem it a system, which without the finger of God, never could have been suggested and agreed upon by such a diversity of interest. – Alexander Hamilton

  32. With the unemployment situation in the US, it shouldn’t be hard to find someone who isn’t an asshole.

  33. In regards to whether he can be fired or not, not sure the laws where he lived exactly, but can you not choose to fire anyone so long as you pay severance?
    I am absolutely certain a company of that size required him to sign papers upon hiring that says he is representing the company at all times and his behaviour outside of work could affect his employment. And I’m sure filming yourself attacking a drive thru employee for the views of her company’s owner and choosing to post it on the Internet no longer counts as doing something in your private life.

  34. EBD:
    If it’s not the employer’s call, KevinB, then who, specifically, in your opinion, should get to decide what is and isn’t a legitimate reason for a private business owner to decide to no longer employ someone?
    It’s not a rhetorical question, btw, I’m genuinely curious as to what your answer might be.
    So, who gets to make the call?
    First, it depends on your contract, if one exists. Many old movie studio contracts, for example, had “moral clauses”, where if a star was caught with a dead girl or a young boy, he was immediately cut loose. However, not one of the approximately 20 employment contracts I’ve signed have had a single word, let alone paragraph, about my personal behaviour. YMMV.
    As I’ve posted in this thread and others, commercial relations and personal values have very little to do with each other, unless your commercial business is very much tied up with specific moral codes. I wouldn’t, for example, hire a Muslim or a Jew to teach people how to slaughter and prepare pigs, not that I think they’d be breaking down my door in any event.
    Painting with a very broad brush, I’d suggest the rule is “if your activity as a private person is strongly identified with your employer, and is likely to bring disrepute on your employer” then the employer might have cause to fire you.
    So, for example, let’s say you’re caught smoking pot. Let’s also say, for the sake of argument, there are no morality clauses in your contract. Two cases: you work for GM. Does GM have the right to fire you? Case law says no, but they do have the right to random testing. GM has a vested interest in ensuring their line employees are not impaired or endangering other employees. Case 2: You work for “Just Say No” (or any other anti-drug organization). Again, absent specific contract exclusions, I’d say they do have the right to fire you, as your actions are in complete opposition to the organization’s stated goal.
    But let’s get to the real issue, shall we? Is an employer entitled to fire an employee for issues of conscience? Should Henry Ford have been entitled to fire any worker who was a Communist? Should the NDP be able to fire their chief fundraiser if they found out she was a CPC member? Lest you think I’m being facile, these are examples where the employee’s beliefs are in long-term conflict with the organization’s goal. What if the CPC-leaning NDP fundraiser was very good at her job? Even though she was bringing in the cash, should the NDP have the right to fire her? I don’t think so. Should any company have the right to drive past their employees’ homes during an election, and count who’s Conservative and who’s not? I don’t think so.
    What we’re talking about is ‘discrimination’ – a perfectly nonjudgmental term which has been morphed into a judgmental one. And the law has been fairly clear on this. Can I deny you an apartment because you’re queer? No. Can I deny you an apartment because you’ve dealt drugs from an apartment in the past. Well… it depends, but basically, yes. Again, as a libertarian, are you directly hurting people by what you believe/profess/do? If not, go for it. If you are, stop. Where it gets tricky is “Do your personal actions do the company more harm than good?”. And the CFA is a perfect case.
    For a few days, CFA might have had a net loss in sales. Then, in response to the boycott, they might have had a huge increase in sales. In the long term, who wins: the anti-CFA crowd, or the pro-delicious chicken sandwich crowd? Again, without taking sides in the SSM/non-SSM debate, I’m hoping for the latter.

  35. That was a perfect non-answer. Should have been a politician.
    If I don’t want to rent to someone because I don’t like their looks, I wouldn’t rent to them. Period. End of story. My decision.
    Private property is for my enjoyment, not for the enjoyment of someone else.

  36. KevinB:
    “Is an employer entitled to fire an employee for issues of conscience?”
    An employer can employ a particular individual, or not employ a particular individual. A private business is not a public utility, and no one has either an entitlement or a right to be employed by any particular private business. To even ask whether an employer is entitled to not employ someone is to beg the question.
    “Can I deny you an apartment because you’re queer?”
    Whether it’s morally right to decide not to rent one’s property to someone for such a reason is a different question, but as to whether someone can, the answer is yes, very easily. If there are strict laws against denying an apartment to someone on the grounds that he’s gay/straight/Rastafarian/bald/sneaky-looking, you simply don’t announce to the rejected applicant that you’re rejecting him because he’s gay/straight/Rastafarian/bald/sneaky-looking. There are a million other ways around such laws, too; you could, for, example, make it standard practice to tell each applicant that you’ll show him/her the apartment, but that there’s about a 40 percent chance that a previous applicant who you’re still waiting to hear confirmation from will get the apartment, but that you’re showing other prospective tenants the apartment in the meantime.
    I have an entirely different — essentially opposite — mindset than yours regarding both the terms of employment and terms of tenancy as they pertain to *private* non-unionized businesses. It seems to me that you believe one has a right to force a private business owner to continue to employ you unless they are able come up with a valid reason, from a government-approved list of valid reasons, for not doing so. I disagree. It goes without saying, obviously, that if one has a contract with some company laying out such terms and conditions, that contract is legally binding, but if, say, Farmer Bob hires me to muck out his barn, the question of whether he’s “entitled” to tell me that he doesn’t need my services any more, or, concomitantly, whether he’s required to provide justification, either to myself or to government providers of “rights” and “entitlements”, for his reasons for doing so, seems almost like a joke to me.
    Going back to the tenancy issue for a moment: When I was applying to rent a house in North Vancouver about twenty years ago, it never occurred to me for even one second that my prospective landlord, a lovely Persian fellow and his family, had anything resembling an obligation to either rent the property to me, or – more to the point here – to provide me with an explanation as to why he wouldn’t rent to me if he chose not to do so. I understood implicitly that it was his property, that I had no entitlements to it whatsoever, and that he was perfectly free to choose, based on nothing more than his gut feeling, who would get to live in the house that he owned.
    Me and my girlfriend at the time fully understood that we were asking him, in effect, if he would be willing to rent his house to us. If he had decided not to rent the property to us because I wear size 12 shoes, that would have been his prerogative.

  37. EBD:
    Sure, I think I understand what you’re saying. If you don’t want to hire/rent to someone because he’s black, that’s your prerogative, if I understand you correctly.
    So are you suggesting that we return to the 1950’s, with all the Jim Crow laws? Because that is the logical end of your position. Let me be explicit:
    Should you, as a restaurant owner, be allowed to have separate areas for white and non-white customers? Should you, as an employer, have separate washrooms for white/non-white employees? Note that I’m not alleging that you would do this; I’m just asking, in your view, should it be legal?

  38. Oh, and Marco:
    What if I’m not banging the boss’s daughter, but her cousin? What if I’m banging a black woman?
    Does your vision of the employment contract include the boss’s approval of your sex partners? If not, where do you legally and logically draw the line?

  39. “Are you suggesting that we return to the 1950’s, with all the Jim Crow laws? Because that is the logical end of your position.”
    You can take a mulligan on that one. Having read scores of your other comments here at SDA, Kevin, I’m close to 100% sure that you are possessed of more than enough reasoning/logical ability to realize that, however desperately one attempts to redefine the meaning of the word “logic”, the advocation of legally mandated racial separation is clearly and self-evidently not the “logical end” of the position stated in my last comment.
    It should go without saying, but to argue against subjecting owners of private businesses/rental properties to mandated integration/segregation laws is not to argue in favour of subjecting owners of private businesses/rental properties to mandated integration/segregation laws.
    “Should you, as a restaurant owner, be allowed to have separate areas for white and non-white customers?”
    Well, sure, if you, as a restaurant owner, want your restaurant to be vandalized, picketed, shut down within twenty-four hours, and probably burned to the ground, and you want your employees and members of your family harassed by the media and by enraged citizens until you’re forced to flee the city flailing knock-kneed, with a torn ring muscle, and you want to lose all the money you put into your former business in short order, I suppose you have that right, in the same sense that you have a right to place your head in a log-splitter and push the button. But you’d be a former restaurant owner in short order.
    It may be morally repugnant, never mind bad business practice, for the owner of a *private* business to deny someone entry into an establishment because of his race or religion or cultural beliefs, but just as someone has the right to decide who he lets into his house he should also have a right, IMO, to not serve Swedish guys named Lars, or people with freckles and a limp.
    It’s private property. In my opinion – which I understand is different than yours, and that of many other people – I don’t think anyone has a human *right* to enter onto other people’s private property.

  40. Maybe not a world record for straw men creation, but KevinB should certainly receive honorable mention.

  41. nothing squared:
    Care to back that comment up? I don’t set up straw men; I merely take people’s positions to where they would end up. Some people find that uncomfortable.
    EBD:
    Really? If you have the right not to serve anyone, on any basis whatsoever, other than you don’t like something about him – which is exactly what you said – how would that not result in the types of discrimination I suggested?
    And your reason for not doing so is you do not “want your restaurant to be vandalized, picketed, shut down within twenty-four hours, and probably burned to the ground, and you want your employees and members of your family harassed by the media and by enraged citizens “?! Let’s leave aside “shut down”, as I don’t want to get into the side argument of who exactly, and by what right and law, would do so. Your reason for not exercising your right is your fear of vigilantes? I’m just curious: what other rights do you forgo out of fear? Because isn’t that the issue that started this thread? A man spoke out because of his personal beliefs, and people took it out on his business. Silly me.. I thought the point was that people’s private opinions and behaviour are just that – private. And yet you, marco, and others seem to suggest that any business owner has a right not to do business with someone because of their private opinions and/or actions.
    But let me return to your argument, and, if I may, reduce the ‘vandalized, picketed’ etc. to “General Societal Disapproval” (GSD). Are you suggesting (and I’m asking, not accusing) that GSD is a valid means of constraining private action? That if you live in, for example, a heavily Conservative neighbourhood, you shouldn’t put an NDP sign on your lawn out of fear of GSD? That if you’re a Muslim running a cab, you shouldn’t put a “no dogs allowed” sign on your cab out of fear of GSD? If you want to enter into a SSM or polygamous marriage, you shouldn’t do so because of GSD? I am curious as to how this constraint should be constrained.
    Finally, lest anyone think I’m churlish: you were quite right to call me on my ‘Jim Crow’ comment. To argue, for example, against the criminal laws against pot smoking is NOT to argue that everyone should be REQUIRED to smoke pot. I tossed off the Jim Crow allegation without thinking about its consequences, and I apologize for that laziness.

  43. KevinB: ” I don’t set up straw men …”.
    Really? I have lived in the most redneck province most of my life, I have never seen what you describe … is Toronto different?
    Wait, no, I correct myself … in the 70’s the bars in Jasper National Park had a section labelled “Men” and another one labelled “Ladies & Escorts” … how do you get more racist than that?
    BTW: Sorry, I didn’t know that you are going for the world record.
    Volts rule!!!!

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