This Wapo op-ed by deBoer is worth reading, but in his eagerness to prove his point (that employer power over your speech is traditionally bad for the Left) he conflates two very different things.
I think most every liberal and leftist agrees that routine monitoring of employee communications is threatening. And while we may disagree on whether there should be laws against it, we would rather employers not fire people just for saying who they want for President or talking about controversial issues on Facebook.
However, that’s not what happened in any of the high profile cases he mentioned (google, Sacco, Eichs, etc) and it’s foolish to pretend it is. A large, loud mob formed threatening bad publicity and boycotts for the company, unless they fired someone who had become a public fixation (half through error, half through random chance.)
To talk about employer “rights” here is silly. It’s not like the employer innately wants to fire this person (and in most of these cases the employer knew about the offense well before it became public.) They will however, react to the demands of the mob, unless an even stronger force prevents them.
On cases like these, there are the more fundamental ethical questions of “How do we respond to mob demands? How do we respond when we agree with the point of the mob? When we disagree? Do we want a legal framework that limits what responses companies can have?”
It’s true that if we set a norm of “companies should fire someone when the mob finds them objectionable” then that can bleed into your employer monitoring your Facebook at all times “just in case.” But that’s not the only issue at play here.
For instance, I found these tweets by Popehat, a legal explainer who leans hard on “rights have legal meaning but free speech is not freedom from consequences” hilarious:
What what… thousands of people can yell about a person, and that’s fine, but if an institution wants to act on that yelling? Heaven forbid. You fully expect small institutions are gonna be happy keeping around someone who is “shunned and reviled by everyone?” No, that doesn’t work. If you make someone into a public humiliation, and tar everyone they are associated with, those organizations will seek to disassociate themselves. If that’s not a result you want, don’t publicly pile on someone.
(I’m not really trying to defend Peter here. He’s literally in a mob with torches, so if anyone is guilty of mob tactics, its him. Just you can’t really wish for the world where rogues are widely known and intensely mocked and villified by the masses, but they don’t lose their job or school position or anything else. You gotta choose.)
For me, the most exhausting thing about the “why can’t we fire someone for having terrible opinions / it’s overkill to starve people or expel them from society for their terrible opinions” dichotomy is that it feels like it’s really a debate about rights and social support and who is obligated to provide them, but that aspect never gets foregrounded. Like, if we don’t want to force institutions to employ or support pariahs at their own expense, and we don’t want to completely destroy pariahs on principle, the obvious solution is to reduce the extent to which people are dependent on the support of institutions and employers, particularly private ones. People care a lot about school and jobs because those things are crucial to life in our society, and I don’t think there’ll be a satisfactory solution to the shunning issue as long as that stays the case.
Of course, the other part of the problem I guess is that it’s hard to maintain a space between “this person is somewhat unpopular and often criticized” and “this person is universally loathed as an enemy of society” – shunning seems to be a taboo designed that a situation doesn’t decay toward the former equilibrium, not because the latter is correct but because it’s, I guess, closer? Social sanction is not a fine instrument.
