Obama’s NLRB Decrees That Employers Must Tolerate Profanity and Insubordination From Employees

23 Sep, 2014 by Dave Blount

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This can’t be America. It must be the Twilight Zone:

Hooters drew some unwanted attention last spring when an NLRB administrative law judge ruled in favor of two employees who had been fired for cursing at a co-worker in front of restaurant guests.

America is the Land of the Free. In any free country, you employ who you want to employ. If employees behave unprofessionally and curse in front of customers, you fire them. Insectile bureaucrats in some faraway Kafkaesque castle have nothing to do with it. Consequently this can’t be America.

It gets worse:

Now comes a paper in which attorneys at the Holland & Knight law firm note a disturbing NLRB trend of condoning profanity and insubordination among U.S. workers. They’re warning employers about a pattern of board decisions “that attack sensible, long-standing management standards of conduct.”

Authors Frederick Braid and Loren Forrest note a recent case in which the board sided with an employee of an auto dealership who cursed out the owner in a meeting to discuss compensation. The employee used words not fit for a family newspaper as he insulted the business owner, called him “stupid,” told him that nobody liked him and that he would regret it if he fired the abusive employee. After the dealership went ahead and fired the worker, the NLRB ruled that the business had violated the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRB said the employee’s behavior was neither “belligerent” nor “menacing.”

But useless NLRB bureauweenies don’t sign the paychecks. Therefore it is not up to them to determine what is belligerent and menacing. It is up to the employer, whose relationship with employees in anything even vaguely resembling a free country is mutually voluntary.

Still more insanity:

In a case involving Starbucks Corp. , report Messrs. Braid and Forrest, “the Board again reinstated an employee” who engaged in profanity-laced tirades against his manager. “The first tirade occurred when the employee felt that his manager was slow to assist him during a busy day at Starbucks. Instead of thanking his manager for the requested assistance, which the manager provided, the employee said, ‘about damn time.'” The worker then used foul language and told his boss to “do everything your damn self.”

The NLRB decided the employee’s behavior was simply a pretext used by Starbucks to fire him for pro-union views.

Under the current regime, holding or proclaiming yourself to hold pro-union views might make you unfireable.

No one could have guessed that America would degenerate into the kind of place that would elect Obama president, resulting in the federal government being staffed by adolescent Marxist tyrants who issue lunatic decrees out of sheer spite against capitalist business owners. But any idiot could have predicted that allowing the government to determine who you employ would soon lead to dysfunction and despotism.

This is why we have the Tenth Amendment: to prevent the federal government from destructively meddling in our affairs in ways too absurd for the Founding Fathers to have specifically foreseen.

Tip your waitress well. If she thinks you’re stingy, she just might dump a pitcher of beer over your head. Provided she holds pro-union views, it’s not like she could lose her job over it.