(This is old news, as it happened in October of last year but still instructive.)
Michael Italie was a sewing machine operator at Goodwill Industries in Florida, who also ran for mayor of Miami on behalf of the US Socialist Workers Party. A few days after he appeared on a televised debat with the other candidates for mayor, he was sacked:
On Oct. 22, a sewing-machine operator named Michael Italie was fired by Goodwill Industries, the network of nonprofit groups best-known for collecting and selling used clothing and furniture in order to provide job training for the disabled. Among Goodwill’s lesser-known functions is to supply low-cost contract labor to the federal government. Italie’s job was to sew U.S. Navy jackets in Goodwill’s Miami plant. The factory had been humming since Sept. 11; to meet the surging demand for American flags, it had gone on a 24-hour production schedule.
At 5 p.m., half an hour before the conclusion of his 10-and-a-half-hour shift, Italie’s supervisor called him into the personnel office, where he was greeted by the plant’s head of security. “Because of your views of the U.S. government, which are contrary to those of this agency, you are a disruptive force and cannot work here anymore,” he said, according to Italie. “Take your things and go.”
Italie does indeed have a view of the U.S. government that is unconventional, even hostile: As a member of the Socialist Workers Party, he favors creation of a “workers’ and farmers’ government” in the United States along the lines envisioned by Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. (The Socialist Workers Party began life in 1928 as a Trotskyist splinter from the Communist Party U.S.A., but over the past 30 years the venerable blood-feud between Leninists and Trotskyites has faded.) “We don’t advocate violence,” Italie told Chatterbox. “Violence is rooted in the capitalist system.” (He really does talk like that.)
According to the above Slate article this politically motivated firing was completely legal. I find that disturbing. In my view employers should never be able to fire their workers for what they do outside work (apart from criminal activities like
theft or rape).