The Single Best Point about Cancel Culture

In all the back and forth about Cancel Culture, a central issue is that as-will employment makes the effects of publish shaming far more dire than they should be.

Being an asshole on Twitter should not be a firing offense, no matter how much it might justify shame and approbrium:

You know what should be canceled? The legal right of most bosses to fire you for a “good cause, bad cause, or no cause.”

That status quo is so widely accepted that some progressives don’t think twice about appealing to the authoritarian power of bosses in the pursuit of social justice: Many high profile social media campaigns have been employed to get people who are caught on video committing racist acts in their everyday lives fired from their jobs. But the desire to hold racists and sexists accountable—or the related struggles against sexism, homophobia and fascism—need not be in conflict with the principles of workplace rights.

So-called “cancel culture” is not well-defined, but its critics frequently use the moniker to refer to an activist program of making individuals who harm their neighbors or coworkers with acts of racism, sexism (and worse) accountable through exposure and de-platforming—including attempts to get them fired. Liberal critics have been more likely to raise free speech concerns than any about workers’ rights, while leftists are likelier to argue that free speech doesn’t mean freedom from the consequences of speech.

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Three years ago, we published an op-ed in the New York Times explaining how U.S. workers lack a basic right to their jobs that many workers in other countries enjoy as a legal standard. As a solution, we proposed a just cause “right to your job” law as a badly needed labor law reform. Since then, we’ve been encouraged to see the issue turn up on many progressives’ agenda.

In the debate between a right to your job and the need to de-platform bigots, some have raised concerns that without the boss’s right to fire an employee for any reason, racists and sexists would get more of a free pass at work. But this argument misses what “just cause” means. It doesn’t mean that employees cannot be fired, it means they can’t be fired for a reason that’s not related to work. Racism, sexism, harassment and other forms of conduct in and out of the workplace that make other employees feel unsafe and violate policies around respect and equity are grounds for discipline and termination—but are also subject to due process. When you look at how “just cause” plays out in areas where it exists—in the public sector, under many union contracts, or in other countries—it’s clear that racists, sexists and harassers are, in fact, disciplined.

Indeed.