
Ending at-will employment: a better remedy for cancel culture? - dgellow
https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-better-remedy-for-cancel-culture
======
keiferski
Ending at-will employment is a legal solution to a cultural problem. Unlikely
to work, but more importantly, I’d argue it’s unwise to rely on legal codes to
solve non-legal problems. You end up ignoring other forms of education and
culture (for example, from the family or local community) in favor of those
which are explicitly written down.

Instead I think we need to collectively, as a society, be less sensitive to
perceived insults and disagreeable opinions. Words are not violence.
Disagreement is a natural, healthy consequence of a diverse society.

~~~
paulgb
I think a lot of the unspoken debate on "cancel culture" is how much of a
_culture_ it actually is. If you spend all of your time on Twitter it can seem
like the whole world is entangled in cancel culture, but in reality I think
the majority of people have better things to do than call on strangers to be
fired.

Employment law seems to me like a surface-level-reasonable way to prevent
small mobs on twitter from spilling over into the real world.

~~~
throwaway0a5e
>but in reality I think the majority of people have better things to do than
call on strangers to be fired.

But if the majority of people are forced to behave super conservatively in
order to hedge against cancel culture does it really matter how small that
vocal minority really is?

I see the phenomenon to be similiar to people being worried about frivolous
lawsuits or being worried about Karen calling the police because their kids
are playing outside unsupervised. These events are rare but fear of them
shapes all of society's behavior in a bad way.

~~~
paulgb
Right, the problem is that a small mob of people can have outsized control by
putting pressure on individual employees. To that employee, it doesn't matter
how big the mob is.

But in terms of ending cancel culture, if a small mob is all it takes, how
effective can anything _but_ employment law be? People calling on someone to
be fired, after all, have free speech rights themselves; the best the law can
do is limit the consequences of that speech.

~~~
pjc50
> People calling on someone to be fired, after all, have free speech rights
> themselves

Somehow the "everything is free speech and nobody should ever be censored"
arguers forget this.

~~~
loopz
Free speech is not a positive in isolation, but need to be channeled
constructively according to democratic principles. Most people are not
educated to wield that power.

~~~
anthonygd
Did you just say most people are not educated enough to have free speech?

~~~
loopz
Yes indeed. Of the kind social media optimize on, most people are NOT educated
enough for, or rather, society have not enough controls for; fringe outrage
growing into trends and mob.

Beware empty belief in general principles.

~~~
perfunctory
> most people are NOT educated enough for

That was a rather fringe outrageous thing to say.

~~~
loopz
Indeed. So will you protect it, or will you lie?

Let me clarify: While people may be educated enough to cast votes how many
beans is in the jar, or what cause to support in the moment, they are mostly
not equipped to be jury and judge of mob rule, or am I wrong?

------
badRNG
This doesn't seem to cover "cancel culture" more generally, but narrows in on
regular workers being terminated for their political beliefs.

Is that what cancel culture is? I certainly don't think that's what most folks
are referring to when they discuss "cancel culture." Is what's being mentioned
here the common act of terminating employees who go on racist rants or act out
violently and go viral? The piece preempts the objection of employers
protecting employees from hateful conduct (without taking a stab at how
exactly one should balance those interests,) which makes me think that these
terminated employees are at least a portion of what the author is discussing.

I share the author's skepticism for the utility "Right To Work" laws provide
workers, but I don't understand how this relates to "cancel culture."

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Cancel culture is calling for firings or other loss of status due to
expressing a political view or social view that does not conform to a large
in-group with the ability to draw attention to an artifact (often taken out of
context, with no due process) that undermines your reputation.

The other word for cancelling someone is bullying them.

~~~
manicdee
Cancel culture is right-wing code for “facing the consequences of my actions.”

No longer is being fired for being a Nazi facing the consequences of one’s
actions, it’s the result of a targeted harassment campaign aka “cancel
culture.”

Bullying implies the aggressor has a power advantage over the victim.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
You could just as easily say it is code for people on the left to impose their
personal moral view as a Borg-like culture mandate where any dissent
whatsoever will lead to having your life ruined through mob justice that
considers no facts, context or due process.

------
devit
The problem is that people are dependent on employment by a single party and
finding a new employer is not automatic, which creates a huge non-diversified
risk and creates abusive dynamics.

The solution is to make it easy, normal and automatic to either find new jobs,
be a contractor for many parties, or be unemployed, living on UBI/rent/self-
production and not dependent on finding work.

Monogamous relationships have the same problems and the same solutions (easy
serial monogamy, non-monogamy, or being content being in a relationship with
oneself).

~~~
nickthemagicman
I think you're more correct than this article. I read the first few sentences
of the article and thought .. if employment was not at will,job interviews
would be next to impossible.

~~~
dgellow
The US is the outlier here, every single European country I'm aware of has the
level of protection suggested by the article. And job interviews aren't an
issue.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Maybe it's why most businesses come to the U.S. lol

~~~
manicdee
Maybe it’s why so much business left the US for China and India.

------
bjornsing
I’m in a country with very strong labor rights (Sweden), but we still have
serious issues with cancel culture. You may not get fired, but you can be
reassigned to a different position or have your career ruined. Also your
employer can make your life pretty miserable if they want to get rid of you
but can’t fire you. You can also run into problems when applying for a new
job. It’s not a great solution IMHO.

~~~
dgellow
> Also your employer can make your life pretty miserable if they want to get
> rid of you but can’t fire you

Isn’t that illegal?

~~~
bjornsing
Depends on what you mean by miserable and how sensitive you are I guess. An
employer holds a lot of perfectly legal authority over you. It’s hard to say
that anything that makes anyone miserable would be illegal.

------
pjc50
Step 1 for talking about "cancel culture": define the terms of reference.

This seems to have a sensible approach given that it refers to people who are
not public figures being subject to misinterpreted incidents caused by outrage
spreading on social media, resulting in them being fired by their employer.

> While the government is not entitled to punish political dissent, in most
> parts of America it is perfectly legal for your boss to fire you if they
> happen to dislike the person you voted for in the last election.

Indeed. At-will employment with zero notice periods and no process is
ridiculous. That's at-whim employment.

> But there are no equivalent federal protections to prevent employees from
> being disadvantaged because of their political views.

This .. is much more fraught. And they know why:

> Clearly, for example, no member of an ethnic minority should have to endure
> racist taunts at their place of work. But this could also be addressed
> through carefully worded legislation. Seattle already offers exemptions for
> political conduct that would cause “substantial and material disruption of
> the property rights of the provider of a place of public accommodation.”
> Employers also have an affirmative obligation to protect employees from
> racist harassment.

~~~
afiori
> Step 1 for talking about "cancel culture": define the terms of reference.

Part of the problem is that it is quite hard to do so, or rather it is very
error prone.

Something similar happens with the right to repair movement, it both cases it
is very easy to mischaracterize both the problem and proposed solutions.

For me cancel culture is how easily mobs are created online calling for action
on inconsistent criteria. But it is quite easy to identify this phenomenon
with the propensity of corporation to listen to these mobs.

------
0xfaded
Europe has this, and I'm a small employer. The question "what will it cost to
let this person go if I need to?" goes through my head even before "is this
person qualified?".

Stronger worker protections lead to a divide between people who have jobs and
those for who there are not enough jobs. Go look at southern Europe or South
Africa.

What workers need is the security of a viable alternative to their employer.
Us techies can change jobs at will and have no need for this type of
protection. The best general alternative I'm aware of is a publicly funded
unemployment and retraining scheme such as A-kasse in Denmark. Even better
would be UBI, but that would require more political will.

Society needs private entrepreneurs and corporations, and should work to
support them. In turn, society should take what it needs (better put, society
should only allow so much to be privatised) as to ensure stability and quality
of life for citizens.

Business is hard. Don't make it harder in the name of transferring the
responsibilities of society as a whole onto the companies.

------
14
I was actually talking about this yesterday with my dad and we are Canadian so
have “protections” and are not able to be fired without cause. However in
reality what we discussed is that if they want to fire you they will do so.
They will hyper focus on your performance and pick at anything. Small mistakes
get written up and if they really want you gone will just lie about some
things like claim always tired at work, slacking off, not on time whatever.
This won’t happen at big public or government companies but definitely could
happen at a smaller privately owned one. An example of this was once my dad
cut off the tip off his finger at work. The doctor stitched him up and said
you will need 6 weeks off work for this to heal. My dad laughed and said doc I
am going to be back to work in less then an hour I can’t get time off work I
will be fired. The doctor said “they can’t do that” to which my dad laughed
again and explained that’s not how the real world works if they don’t like you
they will fire you and just lie. So yes there are protections but they just
change the number of steps how you get a person fired.

------
grasshopperpurp
This is a real solution to a real (maybe exaggerated?) problem, but I'm
curious to see how people in general would accept it, because the solution is
associated with the Left, and the problem is associated with the Right. It's
clever framing, and the benefits would reach far beyond the issue of cancel
culture, but I doubt D's or R's as groups would seriously consider it. Hope
I'm wrong.

~~~
speeder
I am a gamedev, and at least to us cancel culture became a really serious
issue, it even caused a suicide of a famous indie dev after a Twitter mob made
his business partners dump him and disavow him.

~~~
ModernMech
You call them a "Twitter mob", the game devs call them their customers and
fans. If your customers and fans are telling you they'd rather not buy, use,
and support your product if they know it's made in part by a known serial
sexual assaulter of women, what would you do?

The guy sounded seriously mentally unwell. Maybe if we had better support for
mental illness and less stigma around the whole issue, the outcome would have
been different. But I find it hard to put blame for his suicide on the people
who didn't want to be associated with him after his despicable behavior became
known.

~~~
speeder
If you read more about it, the people accusing him and calling for the game
cancellation are NOT the clients of the gamedev. Since I am in that field more
or less I know why the distancing from him was necessary, and had nothing to
do with the buyers.

The other thing is, the accusation (it was a single one in fact) was flimsy,
the accusar have accused a lot of other people over the years and made some
weird claims (like claiming she murdered a person in an alleyway)

I said twitter mob because it was a twitter mob, literally, outsied twitter he
was not that bashed, it was only on twitter that there was a huge storm of
people bashing him, mostly people that weren't going to buy his game in first
place.

~~~
ModernMech
Maybe we are talking about different incidents then because the one that comes
to mind is Alec Holowka, where there were multiple instances of abuse and his
own sister believes he did what he's accused of. Those who fired him
specifically state it was not because of a "single flimsy accusation", so I
guess you're talking about something else?

~~~
spoopyskelly
The Twitter Mob aren't customers or fans. They are a vocal minority of
perpetually outraged busybodies that just want to control everything.

~~~
ModernMech
Well in the case I am referencing specifically the people involved wrote a
very detailed rationale for their reaction and specifically noted their choice
was _not_ due to appease a mob
([https://www.reddit.com/r/NightInTheWoods/comments/cxqjp8/end...](https://www.reddit.com/r/NightInTheWoods/comments/cxqjp8/end_of_summer_backer_update/))

But in a general sense I don't see why you assume that the "mob" are not
customers or fans. How does "cancel culture" even work if the actual customers
and fans maintain the same level of sales? What is the mechanism by which
public pressure causes a "mob" to exert control over a company's decisions?

------
ergl
Independently of the effect on online mobs, I think ending at-will employment
is a no-brainer, especially when healthcare is tied to your employer.

In any case, in many european countries we have something similar to Montana:
at-will for a fixed period of time (typically 3-6 months), and after that you
need a good reason to fire someone.

------
swiley
There are other parts of life besides employment. Universities have expelled
or rejected students for publishing things they didn’t like (although this is
rare and usually appropriate IMO.)

------
kakd
Here's another solution: don't use social media.

------
spodek
I believe greater job security would improve many aspects of society, this
argument implies that people with very high job security designed to promote
risky speech would promote more viewpoint diversity.

Yet tenured faculty seem to be part of cancel culture. Heterodox Academy
[https://heterodoxacademy.org](https://heterodoxacademy.org), its members, and
peers are trying to reverse the trend away from diverse views among academics,
but they, or as a member I should say we, are a minority in academia and
swimming against a strong current. That current undermines this article's
argument.

------
kanox
This is nonsense: making people harder to fire won't protect them from other
forms of vigilante harassment.

------
kingkawn
You all discussing this like many of these cancelled folks didn’t do abhorrent
stuff

~~~
spoopyskelly
I think you mean "Y'all".

------
jonahrd
This article (and a bunch of comments here) seem to be arguing against a straw
man: that there are a bunch of "minority opinions" that are being threatened
to be withdrawn from the sphere of discussion by cancel culture, and people
who happen to share these opinions are at threat of losing their jobs over it.

Cancelling is not simply about disagreeing with someone's opinions. It's about
stopping the spread and normalisation of actual sexual violence [1], racial
violence [2], or hate speech [3]

I think it's hard for American engineers (I am one) to understand this, but
there are actually times in which suppressing certain vile speech and acts is
good for society. Our profession deals with absolutes most of the time, but we
forget that there are actually nuances and shades of grey all around us. In
Germany, for example, there are very strict restrictions around Nazi language
and symbolism [4], and for good reason.

Even in the US, there are towns in the south that have a long history of
"cancelling" their local white supremacist chapters. Stores won't do business
with certain people, they aren't welcomed as a part of the community [5]. This
is to protect the town from damaging people and ideas, and is a perfectly
healthy part of growing a community.

These vile acts and words are not worth promoting as part of public
personalities with high-profile jobs. In many cases, those cancelled don't
even face legal consequences for their actions, but are simply removed from
the public sphere. With the way we idolise fame, it's a good way to help make
sure that kids aren't looking up to rapists and racists as idols in our
society.

And just to add another point about several cases which I know people will try
to rebut my point with (Louis CK, Aziz Ansari, ...) These people were never
unanimously cancelled like the others. There were debates even within leftist
communities about how bad these acts were. And reality reflects that. Both
Aziz and Louis have only had relatively minor hiatuses from the spotlight.
Both are back on tour now (I went to see Aziz live last fall). This is not a
"threat to our democracy" or a "threat to minority opinions".

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Weinstein_sexual_abuse_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Weinstein_sexual_abuse_cases)

[2] [https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/films/news/...](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/films/news/mark-wahlberg-racist-hate-crimes-wikipedia-history-
george-floyd-blm-protests-a9554191.html)

[3]
[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/11/tuck...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/11/tucker-
carlson-writer-blake-neff-resigns-amid-allegations-racism/5419820002/)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#Re-
unifi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#Re-
unified_Germany_\(1990%E2%80%93present\))

[5] [https://abcnews.go.com/US/life-inside-small-north-dakota-
tow...](https://abcnews.go.com/US/life-inside-small-north-dakota-town-
terrorized-white/story?id=33778885)

~~~
dgellow
> In Germany, for example, there are very strict restrictions around Nazi
> language and symbolism [4], and for good reason.

I feel that needs a bit of clarification. The reason nazi symbolism is
restricted is because it is promoting an illegal political party. It is a
disgusting ideology full of hate, but its symbolism isn't illegal because it
is vile or hateful. The nazi party (NSDAP, and lot of other related smaller
parties) has been ruled unconstitutional because it is explicitly against the
German constitution. The same has been done with communist parties trying to
overthrow the constitution, and you also have symbolism of the islamic state
that is considered illegal.

My point is: the legal argument is based on the defense of the constitution,
not on the fact that it is considered hate.

Germany also has regulation for hate speech, but that's not what is being used
in the context of unconstitutional political parties.

~~~
anoncake
That is not true. Section 86 StGB explicitly mentions "former National
Socialist organisation" separately from other unconstitutional organizations.
Since they were technically never banned in the FRG (as they didn't exist
anymore), their symbols would be still legal otherwise.

Also the only parties that were ever banned were the SRP (replacement for the
NSDAP) and the KPD (under pressure from the Adenauer government).

[https://www.gesetze-im-
internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...](https://www.gesetze-im-
internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p0917)

~~~
dgellow
Thanks for the correction, I appreciate

------
lazyjones
The bullying/mobbing aspect of Cancel Culture should explicitly be made
illegal. I don't understand how people don't recognize it as what it is:
idealogical "cleansing" in the same way the Nazis, Mao, Stalinists did it.
Simple employer protection as suggested doesn't go far enough, the intent to
harm one's career on ideological grounds must be punished.

~~~
pjc50
... are you going to be able to define this _at all_? Or are you going to make
it illegal to report e.g. someone saying the N-word to their employer?

~~~
lazyjones
Preferably we'll make it illegal to damage someone's career and conspiring to
do so. Just like it's illegal to damage someone's property. You have a problem
with someone's speech? Let authorities handle it. If the N-word is illegal,
tell the police, not the employer. Where's the problem?

~~~
pjc50
It's not illegal. That's the point. You're arguing that it should be illegal
to ever complain about anyone. Writing "the waiter was rude" in a review
shouldn't be a criminal offense.

~~~
lazyjones
> _It 's not illegal. That's the point. _

Then you'll just have to suck it up instead of trying to seek mob justice by
harassing employers.

> _You 're arguing that it should be illegal to ever complain about anyone._

You can complain but not with the intent to damage property or careers. You
can also criticize people but not assault them.

------
rjkennedy98
Has this author never heard of tenure? All tenure has done is push massive
conformity where groups lobby and lobby to make sure only politically correct
people get teaching positions.

~~~
dgellow
That’s off topic, the author isn’t suggesting tenure.

