Fla. man says Home Depot fired him over God button

Originally posted by AshleyD
Therefore, in the name of political correctness, tolerance, and respect, I will keep my religious cash out of their store.

And in my opinion that's exactly the way it ought to work. Businesses make a policy. Employees have the right to not work there if it offends them. Customers have a right to shop elsewhere if they disagree. If it starts hurting the business's bottom-line, the policy gets changed.

Publicly traded businesses exist for one reason - to make a profit. Everything else is secondary to that. Their policy about buttons I'm sure is to take the simplest route: rather than have a separate ruling for every piece of personal "flair" someone wants to wear, you eliminate all of it but the officially approved and supplied. They don't want to be in the button approval business, they want to be in the selling home improvement stuff business. Employees are representing the company on company time. Everything they say, do, and wear reflects back upon the company. If they let Darrell wear his God and Country button, they have to let Phil wear his NAMBLA button unless there's a specific policy about NAMBLA buttons. Way too unwieldy. So it's if it ain't ours, you can't wear it.

And here's an open secret about mega corporations. They all have an employee handbook and other sources of rules and regulations. It's nearly impossible to comply with every tiny rule and reg a company has. In fact, it can be counterproductive. They do that for a reason. If they need to axe somebody, they can literally always find some obscure rule being broken to justify it.

Back in the olden days when I worked for MegaMammoth Corp (name changed to protect nothing in particular) and contract time was coming around, we had a thing called, "work to the rule". That meant we followed every policy and regulation to the letter. Which of course brought productivity down to almost -0- since on a daily basis everyone had to take little shortcuts to get done what was required. Yes, in a huge corporate environment, you're faced with every conceivable roadblock put there by the company that must be surmounted in order to do what the company requires you to do. Which is why most people hate working for huge corporations.

Madness.

reply to post by kosmicjack


Good question. According to the linked story, the issue here is wearing a non-official button on the apron. I guess we'll need to see if someone gets canned for wearing a little cross necklace.

reply to post by fbnks


I think you're assuming facts not in evidence. It's entirely possible that wearing the button fell below the radar. No one complained, so it wasn't addressed. If I'm going to speculate, I'll guess either someone finally complained, or someone forced the issue by sprouting something over the top offensive and was told to stop it. Once that happens, you need a crackdown on everyone for fear of accusation of singling someone out. You know how it works, many infractions are ignored until someone takes it too far. At that point, it's clampdown for everyone. He had the choice to comply and refused. That's why he was fired.

Personally, I think that's a much more likely scenario than thinking he was fired for reading a Bible on his break or lunch.