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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
What happens when a middle class climate activist with a professional job gets arrested for glueing themselves to a public building?
Climate change is firing up middle-class activism
Pilita Clark
Employers are having to think about how to deal with staff who set out to be arrested
In the past 10 days, two friends of mine on opposite sides of the world have both done something I have never seen either do before. One in Sydney cheerfully let her children skip school for a day so they could go to a street protest. Another in London said she was thinking of getting arrested. They do not know each other but both were driven by the same thing: rising impatience with the slow pace of action to curb climate change.
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Organisers say 150 people have been arrested so far and claim this is just the start. We shall see. It is hard to imagine hundreds lining up for handcuffs, especially full-time workers. A criminal record can make a lot of things trickier at work: getting a visa, finding a new job and keeping an old one. Many company codes of conduct prohibit behaviour that is criminal or brings a firm into disrepute. Yet a scan through the donors to Extinction Rebellion’s crowdfunding site, which was raising more than £1,000 a day at some points last week, is revealing.
One £200 donation came from Yan Swiderski, a fund manager who was among the protesters who blocked a busy London road near his Pimlico home the other week. “It was the first time I’ve ever done anything like that,” he told me, adding he felt the new movement had “captured the zeitgeist” for people fed up with years of inaction.
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Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/4460eb0e-f964-11e8-af46-2022a0b02a6c
What an intriguing issue – how do you deal with otherwise excellent staff who suddenly discover an overwhelming inner compulsion to break the law, often in ways which deliberately provoke arrest?
How do you handle repeat unscheduled absence, with the possibility of a longer period of incarceration, from a personnel policy perspective?
What will be the backlash if an employer fires someone for missing work due to their climate activism? Will FOE or the WWF show up at the employer’s doorstep with thousands of demonstrators, demanding the activist employee gets their job back?
firing cause is missing work (depending on # of days and company policy) and the activism should not be an issue unless person stated they were acting as a rep of that company at the time.
reason is using the activism as an issue would lead to lawsuits/etc.
Am I the only one seeing that they have a green lantern ring on their protest sign? It’s just so obvious, how did they miss it?
The employees should be handled the same way other employees who get arrested for doing stupid things are handled.
You can see all the ‘climate change’ activists protesting in France. They are demanding that the French government take stronger, faster action against ‘climate change’. Slightly off color, their vests should be green…isn’t that how the lame stream media will spin this.
I remember a painting that showed the French people clamoring to pay their taxes just before the king lost his head. There just seems to be deniers everywhere. A chicken in every pot! Heat in every house! What! Are they crazy? That’s only for the ruling elite.
Many of these people seem hysterical, terrified by the unceasing drumbeat about destruction of the planet, racism, you name it.
Looks more like a mental problem (mass hysteria)… It can get out-of-hand…
Counseling might work, but even highly intelligent, well educated people, I know, get swept up in the movement/moment… In my experience they tune-out any attempt at reasoning or questioning their beliefs..
Fire them.
Any place I have worked, if you cannot show up for work without just cause, and you do not have enough vacation time to cover your absence, you are fired. Being in jail is NOT just cause according to the employers. Being off work for just cause means being sick, family issues and the like. Interestingly though, if you were off work for a long time because of jail and subsequently found not guilty, most employers will give you your job back with no loss of seniority.
I’m going to join the chorus of “Fire Them!” with the qualifier, follow your usual company policy. If your employee asked for 2 days off, which the company approved, and they’re able to protest, get arrested, bond out and be back at work when they’re supposed to be, no need to fire them immediately. But if your company policy also says, “No arrests…” then you could meet them at the door their regularly scheduled day back and boot their ass. And ALL companies need to grow up and grow a pair and quit folding any time a group of trouble makers appears at their door carrying signs (which they only lift and wave if there is a camera with a number on it pointed their way). Look at the response WRT Chick-fil-A, Hobby Lobby and others who stood on principal and refused to bow down and saw their businesses surge. Upward. Advisers may tell them, don’t make the wrong headlines, but they’re showing mighty poor judgement as to what is the “wrong” headline.
It’s usually,
1. Verbal warning
2. Written warning
3. It’s up to the boss, but they can’t say they weren’t warned about the consequences of ‘playing hookey’.
The activists could “throw a sickie” and claim they are suffering from AGW delusion syndrome.
Start by not adding corporate virtue signaling to the misguided mess.
Unless you’re living in a place without the freedoms we take for granted in the US, you don’t get arrested for protesting unless you are either using force, threatening people’s safety by showing up at their homes, committing theft or vandalism, or interfering with other people’s right to go about their daily affairs. I prefer that those who do any of these things lose their jobs, and maybe their homes too.
The catch is that it is not OK to do any of those things ourselves, even to others who did them first (unless they did them to us personally). So I suggest that when such demonstrations take place, the “activists” should have their names, faces, and video of the events displayed far and wide as possible on social and news media, with a few copies e-mailed to bosses and landlords so that they’ll know what they are enabling if they don’t fire them.
Solidarity in Gdansk in the dangerous situation of citizens who confronted a ruthless totalitarian government, is one thing, but designer-brained useful tools cloned and programed by totalitarian pols to destroy their own economy and deliver themselves and their fellows into serfdom is something else.
I didnt think it possible to erase democracy and the finest economic engine the world will ever know, by a dozen years in public ‘reform’ schools set up by the most stodgy, same-old marksbrother’s formula that killed a 100 million people in the bloody 20th Century. But hey, there must be something catchy about it in the post normal mind. The only thing that makes me an optimist is the 3% in the Soviet Union finally prevailed over the 97%.
To me being an adult is being able to accept responsibilities for your own action.
If you are a ‘child’ then you can argue (often legally) that you didn’t know better. If you become an adult you probably should start acting like one and being responsible for your actions is very high on the list as far as I am concerned.
Should employers look down on employee protesters? Maybe. Maybe not. The work force is a big place and there is no one size fits all. What the employees SHOULDN’T be allowed to do is claim victimhood. They are adults. They should assess the risks and be prepared to live with them.
What broke the old Soviet, the USSR, was that it did not work. In effect the lights finally went out.
It will be the same here, although I hope that it will be before too much damage is done by the Green Blob,. The Russians are still getting over their exxperiement with Communism.
Yet that particular political system appears to be what the Greens wants t to inflict on the rest of us.
MJE
MJE