News headline: Law firm fires 14 employees for wearing orange shirts
Nope. Not kidding.
They weren’t wearing sagging pants or revealing clothing. But dressing in an orange shirt is apparently enough to get fired at one Florida law firm, where 14 workers were unceremoniously let go last Friday.
In an interview with the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, several of the fired workers say they wore the matching colors so they would be identified as a group when heading out for a happy hour event after work. They say the executive who fired them initially accused them of wearing the matching color as a form of protest against management.
[snip]
The law offices of Elizabeth R. Wellborn, P.A. offered “no comment” to Sun-Sentinel reporter Doreen Hemlock, but four ex-employees tell the paper they were simply wearing their orange shirts to celebrate “pay day” and the upcoming Friday group happy hour.
“There is no office policy against wearing orange shirts. We had no warning. We got no severance, no package, no nothing,” Lou Erik Ambert told the paper. “I feel so violated.”
Tell me again how labor’s got the hammer in this country, will you? I keep forgetting.
OK. That’s it. Elizabeth Wellborn going directly to my twitter stream for a virtual shaming.
What next? Fired for a bad hair day? Don’t care for your choice of lunchmeat in the brown bag? Fired? Was there a clothing directive violated? At will. What a concept. Workers real lives as utter abstraction and material for idle entertainments.
No comment? Not for long I bet. Genius PR. Would anyone go near this law firm now? Picketers please. This is a story of national interest because the ‘plans’ are getting more ambitious aren’t they?
When I returned from FMLA leave after my son was born, I was summarily demoted from my job supervising 40 employees to the bottom of the ladder, taking a $25K pay cut. I consulted a lawyer. He said that despite the fact that, yes, it seemed to be in direct contravention of federal law, the Family Medical Leave Act, there was nothing I could do. “This is a right-to-work state. They can just say they were planning to fire you before you went on leave. And they can say they fired you because they didn’t like your haircut.” That’s a verbatim quote from a labor lawyer in Arizona.
BTW, I was demoted because I succeeded in killing a $1M+ boondoggle project that was the darling of my boss. I debated it with her, successfully, in front of the Director. Unforgivable, despite the merits.
Damn, Matt. That’s discouraging in so many ways. To hear a labor lawyer say that . . . so much for law.
Orange is one of the in colors this Spring. The exec should be fired for nothing more than poor fashion sense.