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Notes -
Washington Post v. Karen Attiah
An arbitrator has asked and answered:
Mrs. Attiah is the Washington Post writer who rather famously and falsely claimed that Charlie Kirk had said "Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously" in the immediate aftermath of Kirk's murder. I was going to say ex-, but that's not the case anymore. It's now established rule that the Washington Post can not fire someone merely for dancing publicly in the blood of a recently murdered man to disparage people on the basis of race and gender, and making false claims while doing so.
In this case, at least.
There's a legal formalist perspective where this is defensible. The Post may have included all of Attiah's post-shooting posts in the strict text of the termination letter, but they only quoted a couple posts, so maybe the arbitrator felt that the rest weren't sufficiently plead. Though she does spend enough time to repeat, without noting as false, the false attribution of the quote to a dead man. The Post did argue 'security concerns' at length, and the extent that rhymes with a heckler's veto isn't a great policy matter to rest on. The comparisons to Dave "Ratfucker" Weigel and a random contractor not covered by the stated policies might be pretty nakedly different conduct given context, but perhaps if you squint hard enough and there's no other comparisons, you get stuck with the bad approximations. Attiah isn't a government employee, but she is a union one, so as tempting as the obvious Damore comparisons get, they do have limits.
But it's still the floor, now.
Oh boy! Time to be disappointed in society, maybe a little stressed out.
I’m not really sure that’s the problem here. Thiessen was the bar to clear. If the Post had booted him, or if Attiah had been obviously more extreme, I expect the arbitrator would have gone the other way. See the rejection of the union’s claim of pretextuality.
Fair strike. This is a smaller and less doom-scrolly one, but in turn, it's still pessimistic. I was actually trying to write up the silencer shop stuff last week, and that's more optimistic, but it also just turned into this giant nest of conflicting legal theory instead of anything interesting.
Ignoring for now that Thiessen was not subject to the text of the Social Media Agreement or collective bargaining agreement, the allegations here are that he :
These might have been inadvisable. I could argue that at least some of the efforts were disproportionate. I can believe an arbitrator thinks they have similar violations of rules.
I don't believe that they're similar violations of rules. And I note that the arbitrator neither did actually show that, nor summarized them accurately.
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