In a couple of weeks, I am scheduled to give a talk on discrimination, as in discrimination in employment. While I am against discrimination, I am totally in favor of being discriminating. There is nothing wrong with that. We all do it. We choose the best over the mediocre. As long as that decision is based on quality, and not on one of the score of protected classes, it is perfectly legal and the right thing to do.
At this point, I assume, it is incumbent upon me to reiterate, as I have done in previous articles, that I am not an attorney, nothing in this article constitutes legal advice, and before making a decision regarding your hiring practices you should consult with an employment attorney or other qualified professional. Now, back to our article…
Everyone knows the basic protected classes, by which is meant, people against whom you cannot discriminate because of their status: gender, race, religion, health, etc. One protected class is “creed.” According to the Wisconsin Department of Workplace Development, creed is “a system of religious beliefs, including moral or ethical beliefs about right and wrong that are sincerely held with the strength of traditional religious views.” Let’s remove religion from the equation as religion is a separate protected class in and of itself, and focus on the “moral or ethical beliefs about right and wrong that are sincerely held.”
That is actually what I always thought creed meant, to what it referred, since including religious beliefs in the “class” would be redundant. And, given that we, or at least I, live in the United States where we have the First Amendment, that means the scum of the earth can support whomever and whatever they want, publicly, as long as neither they, nor their detractors (it works both ways), don’t break any laws, at least, as you will read, up to a point. There are ramifications for public pronouncements and behavior.
Well bad on me and I could not be happier to be wrong about the implications of “creed.” I knew you could fire someone because of their beliefs, and of course there is this, a physician celebrating the massacre innocents, a dentist caught tearing down posters of hostages of terrorist, and this one which I still don’t believe I am reading correctly (fired for anti-Hamas posts in America?), but I did not know that you could refuse to hire someone because of their beliefs.
Ryna Workman, president of the New York University Law School Bar Association, penned a statement in support of Hamas and blaming Israel for the terror organization’s latest attrocities. (To be fair, some in the group want to oust her as their president, but it will take two hearings.) Apparently, she had an impressive summer internship and was offered a job by the firm where she had been interning. That is, until her “moral and ethical beliefs” became public knowledge. Then this happened:
“Today, Winston & Strawn learned that a former summer associate published certain inflammatory comments regarding Hamas’ recent terrorist attack on Israel and distributed it to the NYU Student Bar Association,” the firm wrote in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“These recent comments are profoundly in conflict with Winston & Strawn’s values as a firm. Accordingly, the Firm has rescinded the law student’s offer of employment,” Winston & Strawn added.
The firm, which is based in New York, did not name the student.
However, its statement comes after a Monday newsletter message from the president of the NYU Student Bar Association, Ryna Workman, went viral for blaming Israel for the October 7 attacks.
“Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life,” Workman wrote. “This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary. I will not condemn Palestinian resistance.”
And they were not the only law firm to take such action.
Now let’s take this one step further. What about the pro-Hamas demonstrators spewing their bile on the streets of major cities across the country? First, most cover their faces, showing just how much courage they have of their convictions. But it should not be hard to identify them. (Funny how the pro-Israel demonstrators never cover their faces…) Cannot they meet with the same treatment as Workman? (And, no, the irony of her name has not escaped me.) If a law firm can do it, why not any other business?
But let’s not blame the student. After all, don’t some of our citizens (even apparently some district attorneys) say that criminals are victims of societal wrongs and should not be held responsible for their actions? So, for now, let’s adopt that mindset:
What if employers were to decide that, because of the moral deficiencies, in their opinion, of NYU, Harvard, Yale, Penn, and other elite universities, such as Cornell and Columbia, and their leadership, they simply will not hire their graduates. (To be fair, there are decent students who know the difference between right and wrong and who, I would advise, to let it be known by including their actions in their resumes.) In other words, according to this logic, the schools are responsible for their students’ behavior, not the students. As long as it is across the board and they don’t say, for example, “We will only hire Jewish grads of X,” (I guess, I should not use “X” any longer but, just to clarify, I mean a generic university and not the social media platform!) it would appear to me (again, not a lawyer) to be perfectly legal, especially as “university attended” is not a protected class. And if that happens, not only will these universities lose donations, as also reported in the first referenced article in this paragraph, and board members, which also means donors, but they’ll lose students since who, in their right minds, will spends tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars on a diploma from an elite school that is worthless.
Oh, and one Berkeley law professor is calling on firms not to hire his anti-Semitic students. Since, I assume, they are not all anti-Semites, he’ll have to identify the ones who are. Moreover, business owners are requesting the names of students who participated in pro-Hamas activities to be certain that they never hire them. Asking for names reminds me of McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Of course, in this case, it’s not a campaign being led by an alcoholic paranoid liar but by decent human beings who object to beheadings, kidnappings, rapes, murders, and the burning of babies. Let the names be published! It must be legal or the good people at the cited law firms would not have taken the action they took. Of course, they never actually mentioned names so maybe I’m wrong and taking this a step too far. But then again, I’ve been wrong before. But the newspapers published Workman’s name. So maybe I’m not so wrong after all. Moreover, if the BBC can, apparently, take action against pro-Hamas correspondents, and other Brits can denounce Black Lives Matter (BLM) as a “con trick” for supporting Hamas, anything is possible!
So, in conclusion, apparently “creed” is the only protected class that has limitations. Put differently, the “protection” is not absolute. That’s something you may want to keep in mind before commenting on this, or any other, article.
Employment Edification 