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.
I have a much more vivid imagination of what idiotic things people outside of work can say and lots of it should be and is a fire-able offense even if it doesn’t break the law.
Even then, its not that “you can be fired for what you say outside of work”, but in the USA instead we have an extremely small list of things that we outlaw firing people for, and its a good list of protections (protected classes):
For everything else we have “at will” employment, which means you can quiet whenever you like and you can be fired whenever your employer wants to. I’ll agree its got some flaws, but I would not want to add “anything legal under the first amendment” as a protected class.
For the idiot bully in the OP article, she deserved to be fired.
You can always quit work