With a month to go before the election, you’ve probably pulled into the work parking lot with that Obama O on the side of your car or watched the Katie Couric-Sarah Palin interview on YouTube in your cubicle. But you might want to be careful if your boss’ politics run the other way: Virginia law doesn’t protect your job from political beliefs.
C-VILLE got a call from a disgruntled employee we’ll call Bob who claimed he had been fired from his part-time job by his boss, whom we’ll call Alan. In Bob’s version of the story, a work conversation degraded into “[Alan’s] ranting about Palin essentially being a college drop-out,” Bob says, so he “suggested maybe we shouldn’t talk politics.
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Office politics and national politics can be a nasty combo—the law offers no protection if you’re fired for your political views. |
“He kept going, so I say I’m voting for her—and he fired me on the spot. He said if I was going to vote for her, then it showed I was too ignorant to work for him. He made no bones that it was political. It was the most outrageous thing that ever happened to me in my life.”
A conversation with Alan cast plenty of doubt on Bob’s outline of the facts, but C-VILLE was piqued by the central question: Can you get a pink slip for your political affiliations? Might a Bob-like figure sue for being fired because he wanted to vote for Palin? No way, explains local civil rights attorney Debbie Wyatt.
“He has zero rights,” says Wyatt. “ZE-RO.” Bob concedes he didn’t have a written contract. Employment in Virginia is at will and typically eschews written contracts, especially ones that stipulate termination only for good cause. Therefore, as boss, Wyatt says, “you have the absolute right to do whatever you want. You could have only people who think the world is flat. Even if this guy is supporting Obama or has red hair, you could fire him for that.” On the other hand, if the employee felt discriminated against on the basis of age, gender, or race, he could try a civil rights lawsuit. “But,” Wyatt cautions, “good luck in the federal courts.”
Wyatt’s “seen a lot of sad cases from the employee’s point of view, but the other side of the coin is the employer.” Without Virginia’s rules, “any fired employee could go after him, and you don’t want him to spend his entire life in court.”
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