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Not an effortpost, just a casual summary of a court case in which people may be interested:
Audrey Stone was a Southwest flight attendant, and also the president of the flight attendants' union. In her capacity as union president, she attended an pro-abortion protest and at that rally implicitly represented all the flight attendants at Southwest. Specifically, she carried signs with the Southwest logo on them, and the expenses of union members who attended the protest were paid for using union funds.
Charlene Carter was another Southwest flight attendant, who had left the union several years prior and was in active opposition to the union (including leading a recall campaign against Stone). She was opposed to abortion, and therefore was angered by Stone's implicit representation that all of Southwest's flight attendants were in favor of abortion. On Facebook, she sent to Stone various anti-abortion messages, including graphic videos of aborted fetuses.
Stone complained to Southwest, which fired Carter for "representing our company in a manner that is disparaging to Southwest Flight Attendants". An arbitrator confirmed that the firing was supported by "just cause" under the applicable collective-bargaining agreement.
Carter (1) sued the union for failing to properly represent her in the complaint process, (2) sued both the union and Southwest for retaliating against her due to her protected speech (both union-related and religion-related), and (3) sued both the union and Southwest for discriminating against her due to her religious beliefs. A jury agreed that all of these charges were valid, and awarded to her millions of dollars in damages. Due to federal law, the judge capped the damages at 600 k$ in compensatory and punitive damages, 150 k$ in backpay, and 60 k$ in pre-judgment interest.
On the basis of the jury verdict, Carter also asked for an injunction (1) reinstating her to her former position, (2) forbidding Southwest from violating its flight attendants' rights to religious speech and union-related speech in the future, and (3) requiring Southwest to inform all its flight attendants of item 2, including an explicit mention of Title VII (which protects religious speech). The judge granted the request. Southwest apparently asked for some parts of the ruling to be stayed pending appeal, but it did not ask for part 3 to be stayed.
Southwest then openly defied part 3 of the judge's ruling, and instead sent to all its flight attendants a message (1) stating that Southwest would continue to enforce its policies and (2) failing to mention Title VII. Accordingly, Carter moved that Southwest be held in contempt of court.
The judge investigated, and found that the memo circulated to the flight attendants was drafted by one of Southwest's in-house lawyers (Kevin Minchey), who obviously should know better than to willfully defy the judge in this manner.
Therefore the judge: (1) told Southwest to distribute a specific message verbatim, without edits, in order to comply with part 3 of the ruling; and (2), as sanction for this willful disobedience of the court's order, required three of Southwest's in-house lawyers (including Minchey), as representatives of Southwest itself, to undergo at least eight hours of religious-liberty training conducted by a representative of the Alliance Defending Freedom, since the lawyers obviously don't understand religious-liberty law properly.
Relevant court documents:
232 (denial of summary judgment)
374 (confirmation of jury verdict)
467 (grant of sanctions)
483 (denial of stay of sanctions)
The Washington Post complains that "Southwest had a constitutional right to issue a memo expressing its disagreement with the jury verdict". The judge's response to this argument is: Speech can be compelled by the government as long as it is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. Making sure that Southwest's flight attendants are aware of their rights under Title VII is a compelling government interest, and the message that the judge is forcing Southwest to send is as narrowly tailored to that interest as possible. Also, the message ordered by the judge is significantly less objectionable than the longer notice (including an apology) that Carter originally asked the judge to force Southwest to send.
The Washington Post complains that "subjecting lawyers to training by an ideological advocacy group such as ADF", rather than "by accredited law schools", is "ludicrous". But the judge points out that ADF has won multiple Supreme Court cases on the topic of religious liberty in recent years, so it obviously is well-qualified to conduct a training session on that topic.
I hate that this is framed as a freedom of religion issue. So I may publicly disagree with the woke Jacobins without fearing reprimand as an employee as long as my dissent lines up with the teachings of another cult?
Yes. If you talk about being in favor of abortion, say, and you are fired for explicitly that reason, you can absolutely sue.
I doubt most companies will be that dumb in practice, which also seems to be Southwest's main issie here: they lack the finesse to lie and had ideologues break the law without any requisite fig leaves.
I think your abortion stance would have to be informed by sincerely religious belief though, wouldn't it? It couldn't just be secular pro-natalism.
It would seem so, yeah.
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