It’s true, and it’s so wrong. As U.S. laws are written, employers can fire or demote you for any number of reasons, as long as they don’t offend federal or state statutes. These include statutes that protect employees from discrimination based on race, religion, nationality, age, disability, pregnancy, and other factors.
But, as my childhood friends used to say (entirely too often, and without much clarity) “It’s a free country.” This nation’s freedom of speech is enshrined in the First Amendment, which also limits the government’s ability to prohibit or chill political speech or freedom of association with others.
Here is the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
But private sector employees are not the government, and there are no federal (and very few state) restrictions on employers influencing their employees’ political activities. In the following article from the Atlantic Magazine, the writer makes clear that pro-Trump business owners have put pressure on employees to attend Trump rallies. If so, then employers could also force employees to attend “America-hating,” socialist-loving Bernie Sanders rallies. (But, ask yourself why it’s more likely an employer would have employees attend a Trump rally. See below.)
Forcing an employee to listen to Bernie Sanders, at the risk of losing a day’s pay, is “perfectly legal,” because restricting freedom of speech is a big no-no for governments only, not others. That’s why Facebook and Twitter can restrict who gets to say what their social media channels, without fear of lawsuits or regulatory fines –– though the President has Tweeted about their “left-leaning” bias, which could be a warning of tougher government oversight to come.
I’m calling employers out on this as “legal but wrong” because I thought we are supposed to have a democratic system based on each individual voting his or her own conscience, showing up in public for political speeches as a free choice, and writing letters to government officials as a voluntary, freely chosen form of self-expression. But as the Atlantic article notes,
“Federal law has very little to say about employers who exert these kinds of pressures at work; for example, no federal law prohibits private-sector employment discrimination based on political viewpoints. Some state and local laws pick up part of the slack, but they tend to be limited to the most coercive employment practices, such as threatening to fire employees because they expressed support for a particular candidate.”
Unions could be a buffer against this sort of thing by collectively bargaining for protection from politically coercive employers; but unionization has suffered in the past several decades, and for a number of reasons, including recent Supreme Court decisions.
The Atlantic article continued: “Unions cannot prevent employer politicking altogether, of course. The Shell employees were mostly unionized, and yet they still faced a choice between attending Trump’s speech and losing part of their compensation. But things may have been worse if the employees were nonunion: In 2012, miners were ordered by their managers to give up a day’s pay to attend a Mitt Romney campaign event.”
Of course, there are some pro-Trump employers who believe that Democratic candidates are “socialists” who would over-regulate them and reduce their profits. So the phenomenon of employers making politically coercive moves on their workers is far more likely to be on behalf of “right wing” candidates who favor less regulation of business.
Red Alert? Sorry, readers: the only “red” alert is the sea of red at Trump rallies. Don’t expect to see any employers forcing their employees to attend Warren or Sanders rallies anytime soon; when it comes to “business,” employers prefer profits, even if it means supporting an extreme narcissist who, it seems, does not care about American values and American democracy.
https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/10/01/can-u.s.-democracy-policy-survive-trump-pub-77381
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2019/may/25/trump-has-trampled-on-american-ideals-all-along/