The chief executive of a Michigan bank has lost her job after facing backlash for a social media photo of her family in sweatshirts that read “Lake America,” referencing Donald Trump’s relabeling of Lake Ontario.
Jane Smith from Family First Credit Union recently went viral after sharing the photo of her and three relatives wearing navy blue crewnecks with the words “Lake America” scrawled in white. The picture was snapped as her family left on September 11 for a 10-day trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia, but Smith says the sweatshirts were edited onto their bodies using AI.
“We weren’t trying to make a political statement,” Smith told Michigan outlet WJRT. “However, we were kind of poking fun at the fact that one of the Great Lakes’ names were getting changed.”
Family First Credit Union announced Wednesday that Smith was no longer with the company and that Jason Acosta, the chief operations officer, would serve as interim CEO.
See, to me, there’s two philosophies that battle here, with me. I can treat employers as companies, as logic machines, that calculate what revenues they can make and every other business decision. With that framework, I agree, whatever I do in my off hours is my business, they shouldn’t (but do) have the right to meddle with me in that way. Deny the corporate machine access to that info.
But the other framework, where your employee is a person managing a business, I don’t agree. If I am a human business owner, trying to run a good company with standards and practices as guidelines, get told by a potential customer I’ve lost the sale because of the actions of someone I employ, if I see that as a recurring pattern, I gotta weigh if they’re worth keeping.
Now, for me, these two frameworks aren’t exclusive, neither is right or wrong, they just show up in different places. Corporate McDonalds firing a minimum wage employee, that gets the company-as-a-machine model. Small business with like 5 employees? Company-as-a-person. Firing a C-Suite of a large company? Company-as-a-person.
This is company-as-a-person to me because they’re a face of the company. C-suite people get hired because of who they are, whereas minimum wage in a company get hired because of the skills they have.