One Utah

A recent legal case in California raises a number of questions.  

Here’s the story:  Oakland City’s email system was used repeatedly to announce events, invite employees to attend meetings, and join a variety of employee interest groups; in addition some bulletin boards in city offices were available for employees to post news articles of interest, announcements for events, employee groups and so forth.  For National Coming Out day a few years ago, a series of announcements were sent through the city email system to all employees inviting them to participate in and support the event.  The city email system was also used to announce events sponsored and supported by city council members (for instance, one city council member sponsored an anti-war, peace event and invited all city employees to attend).  In response, two women formed what they called the Good News Employee Association - a “pro-family” and, as the name shows, a Christian group.  Their announcement read in part:

Preserve Our Workplace With Integrity . . . a forum for people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day. With respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family Values. If you would like to be a part of preserving integrity in the Workplace, call…

After a complaint by other city employees, Oakland removed the women’s announcement and the city email admin refused to distribute their announcement (however, they were told they could use the city system if they removed offensive verbage from the announcement).  The city argued the women’s group was discriminatory and banned them from posting their announcements at the workplace - again if they changed the language of the announcement they would be allowed to post it in the workplace.  The women who started the organization claimed that they were being censored, that their employer was violating their First Amendment rights (FWIW, I think that was a mistaken line of argument).

Their employer, the city of Oakland, CA, argued the women’s group engaged in hate speech directed at other employees, creating a hostile work environment for those employees.  Thus far, the courts have ruled in favor of the City of Oakland and have held that the women involved had other fora to express their views and values.  The 9th Circuit decision included these phrases:

Public employers are permitted to curtail employee speech as long as their ‘legitimate administrative interests’ outweigh the employee’s interest in freedom of speech”—also affirming that “the district court appropriately described their speech interest as ‘vanishingly small.’”

At issue is the intersection of personal beliefs and values and the public sphere and public policy and goals.  The city has determined it has a legitimate interest in passing and enforcing anti-discrimination ordinances that cover glbt persons; the employee group in question was founded by persons who believe such ordinances violate their personal ethics.  Were the women’s actions inherently illegitimate?  

As you read the Good News announcement, it is obvious they’ve chosen language that is extremely loaded in our culture.  The language may in fact be a perfect expression of the values of the women who founded the group.  Obviously, their choice of language was borrowed wholesale from conservative politics.  At issue is not the authenticity with which they talked about their issues but the way in which the workplace, even a government workplace, is a complicated space in which both public and private concerns coexist.  At times unhappily.  The way in which personal values are expressed in workplace is subject to debate, regulation and rules.  Finding the balance is not going to be easy.

The Oakland City case, for example, is not simply an example of administrative overreach or capriciousness.  Instead, responded to complaints, the city offered the women the Good News group an alternative - change the language you are using which your coworkers find offensive and you can use the bulletin board and the city email.  The Good News organizers were unwilling to make that compromise.

This case raises more questions than it will answer. I’m convinced that the organizers of the Good News Employee Association were deliberately provoking legal action - they wanted a lawsuit and the Wingnut Welfare system guaranteed they had attorneys for it. I’m also equally certain that they felt they were being asked to not bring their private values into the workplace while other employees were bringing their private values into the workplace. What other employees perceived as an open and diverse workplace, was to the Good News organizers a moral cesspool without integrity. Their view was inherently exclusive, holding that a workplace integrity did not include many of their coworkers. The outcome of the case has thus far favored the city unequivocally. Given the choice between upholding the employer’s power to censor employees in the workplace and defending the right of employees to speak their minds in the workplace, the current Supreme Court seems likely to side with the employers - though for different reasons than lower courts. None of which resolves the central question: How does a place or a community which values diversity learn to live with an intolerant minority? The principles of freedom of speech have never been applied in an unlimited fashion in the US but the limits have always been carefully and painfully negotiated to remain as broad as possible.

Historically, we have protected unpopular and offensive speech in the public sphere but no workplace is a purely public sphere. Another relevant example involves an employee of a private company who was fired after sending an incredibly crude, bigoted and offensive broadcast email to the entire company in response to an announcement about a local Gay Pride event; the man argued he was fired for his Christian values; his employer said he was fired for creating a hostile work environment; his case went nowhere. Employers pay for and control the resources of the company - phone, email, bulletin boards and as such have the right to control how they are used, including censoring the content distributed over those resources. But employees do not sacrifice their freedoms at the office so long as those freedoms do not interfere with the work they are expected to perform or the work of other employees.

For many conservative Christians a support group like the gay straight employee alliance found in Oakland is indistinguishable from a political organization. They organized what they perceived as a counter-balancing group and were denied. They believed they were being unfairly censored and they sued. I’m not convinced they were acting in good faith with the city - I believe they deliberately provoked a lawsuit. But such actions don’t preclude or end discussion of the ways in which employers are called upon to make space within the corporation for a variety of private values which as often as not are in conflict.

This entry was posted Sunday, June 17th, 2007 at 9:37 am and is filed under This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.