Oh, please. Let's not get melodramatic. The appropriate response in this circumstance is to ban him from that airline and let the lawyers pursue whatever legal ramifications result from whatever law was broken. And call me insensitive, but if we're talking hypotheticals: if this guy is the best doctor in a field that I or my family need treatment in, then I'm going to see him regardless of his drunken stupidity on one flight. If he's a salesman that can cut me the best deal on a car, then I'm buying the car off him. If he knows more about a structural engineering problem than anyone else in the office, then that's the guy I'm asking. Skill talks. So does money. Probably not to this degree, but I bet EVERYONE here has done something in their life that they deeply regretted once they sobered up, and I don't think that having it utterly ruin every facet of your life is necessarily the best response.
And I think if you go back to VI's response: with the economy being in the shitter, most employees are expendable. If you fuck up in any way that rubs the boss the wrong way, they can easily fill your place with 10 more. Then, you have the top tier employees who represent a company or organization getting sacked because they can't put a bad face on said company or organization. I don't know whether or not I agree with people getting fired for these things, or where the line is, but that's sort of reality for the most part. Edit: did I just imagine that I read that? Maybe someone else said it. I can't find the quote now.
Well, that is your opinion, though. My opinion is that I would never, ever do business with someone that did that, and I am certainly not the only one (as this thread has also indicated, opinions are fairly split). That kind of judgment is so fucked up that I couldn't ever imagine them having good judgment in any way. And the thing is, I'd be willing to bet opinions would be split in this regard. You're perfectly willing to still do business with him, and that is fine, but I'm not, and that is my option. So, for the business, it would boil down to "Well, we'll lose 30%* of our business if we keep this guy around." From a business standpoint, losing ANY business because of his actions could result in him being fired. *Obviously, this is an estimate, but for a company, losing any business because of the actions of an employee can and should result in that employee facing disciplinary action, up to and including being fired.
This is what it boils down to me. You cross the line when you affect the bottom line. It may indeed be a very rare instance when that truly happens- when an employee's off-the-job actions negatively affect profits- but that is the determining factor to me.
If you give your employer a bad name outside of work, if you harm or shame them publicly than it's hard not to blame a company for firing you. However, what you do on your own time-- outside of when you are off the clock-- is none of their goddamn business. I say that with scorn because I personally have a supervisor that thinks it's cool to ask about people's personal lives if he sees them walking around with a frowny face. I don't know about you guys but I find that completely offside. Criminal Records seriously put a damper on the employement industry. A criminal record is a slippery slope of few opportunities and it's expensive and time consuming to get rid of. I think businesses could be at least slightly more lax when itcomes to hiring people that made no-no's in life. I mean, use discretion but non-dangerous (or thieving) people could be hired a lot more often out there. As for the rest of you, know that I can replace any of you with a single phone call. There are tonnes of scab posters out there on temp message boards that would KILL to be where you are right now.
If he can cure my ass cancer sure I'll use him, or hire him. If he sells paper fuck him. Since we're using hypothetical's and all. IF he sells cars, fuck that their a dime a dozen, I'll pay 4% more to not pay the asshat. Sure we've all done things regret when we sober up, you know, wonder why we fucked that gal (guy), regret spending $200 on lap dances and blow, but really really strangely I've never woken up and laughed, "wow I probably should not have slapped the shit out of that nigger kid on the plane" YA sorry, that ones not a "ha ha whoops" kind of sober up pass. Some guys if they are good enough, will be able to have some events like this blow over at work, this guy was 60 and not overly important so, he's toast. Not a shock or surprise, just simply the boss waking up and saying, "fuck you, I don't need this shit", and I don't blame him. I get irresponsible from time to time to time to time, but not even close to racial slur and slappin kids line. I fuck up social lines all the time and don't get near this.
This guy was an idiot. Doesn't he know you have to be a professional athlete to get away with shit like this?
For me, I'd fucking beat him. Would I think he should be fired (assuming he wasn't acting in the course of his employment)? No. Off the clock should mean something. If I filed a complaint with the police, and he was convicted of something carrying jail time, and he loses his job because of that - specifically because he couldn't carry out his duties anymore, then so be it. Otherwise, you pursue whatever civil remedies you can.
I'd think he was an asshole and write him off. Doing that, though, doesn't make him a bad accountant or trader or whatever he is. It would only be a conflict if he was a vet or a kennel owner or something to do with animals.
Those people represent less than 1/10th of 1% of their chosen field. If you really want to split hairs further, the best in the business may only be one person in that line of work. That's what it means to be the best. I'm great at what I do and training someone to handle my core competencies would take a while to get together, but that doesn't mean I'm anywhere near irreplaceable. If I left tomorrow, my coworkers would start forgetting about me shortly before my hand hit the door and I'd be a distant memory inside of 90 days. That's the nature of work. In my experience, the people who run around saying that they're the best at something, or the company would fail without them are delusional. Of course, sales hide sins. Great sales reps are some of the only people in a company who can blatantly violate the rules and get away with it... up until their employer feels like they're making too much money and they're fired and replaced with two reps who are collectively paid less.
This. My dad was extremely adamant in saying, "No one is irreplaceable." You might be irreplaceable in the short-term, but businesses are ALWAYS looking for ways to stay flexible in the face of misfortune. The programming world calls it the "bus factor." If Jim gets hit by a bus on the way to work, who can do his job? If that answer is "No one," then the business has a problem. Because the bus factor isn't just death or crippling injury. Jim could find another, better paying job. He could get arrested tomorrow for molesting his daughter. He could go nuts and scream PROGRAMMING LIMITED HATES NIGGERS over and over again in front of the cameras. He could have a midlife crisis and decide that he wants to own a bunch of Applebees instead of pushing electrons around. So you train everyone else on Jim's work, and you train Jim on everyone else's work in case Bob or Susan does the same thing. Most of my own job isn't work anymore; it's teaching other people how to do my job so that they can pick up the slack when I leave. So, it's not like a business is going to fire Executive Shithead for slapping a kid and immediately take millions of dollars in loss. They're going to replace him with someone who is slightly less effective (or perhaps much less effective) who will then improve with experience and training. Sure, it'll cost money, but it won't be crippling. That being said, there are jobs where someone seriously is irreplaceable and the guy can act like Dr. House and still keep his position. Thing is, the business doesn't like being held by the short and curlies like that, and they will do whatever it takes to remove his stranglehold.
Omegaham makes a good point. My EVP runs our department in this way and calls it Total Football after Johan Cruyff's Dutch soccer strategy. Basically, it allowed everyone to understand everybody else's position and thus could rotate and fill in if someone was out of position for a time. Thus it takes up the slack in the case of a sudden departure or something. More and more companies are doing similar things because with the recent uptick in competitiveness in the job market, more and more people are moving around and contingency plans need to be in place. As far as the overall theme of personal effecting your work life, I think it depends on the situation. I got into a large argument in a Human Resources class I took in grad school cause my professor, who was a fucking opinionated dinosaur and an arrogant bitch, felt that companies had every right to have complete access to a Facebook profile and make staffing decisions based on what they found. It's completely ridiculous and invasive. Me being blackout drunk on a Saturday night and having a picture posted of me grinding on random girls doesn't affect my job performance in any way. I know, because I've done it. It's just an excuse for overbearing managers and HR prudes to discriminate against prospective employees and way to attempt to create work-obsessed robots by weeding out those who seem to have too ambitious of a social life. Any connections between that and "responsibility" or work ethic in a professional sense is pure speculation at best.
This came up in the other thread, but I think it's appropriate here. Here's a list of Presidents that would not get elected due to 'issues outside employment that affect work performance.' George Washington: Philanderer, married for money, not a very good soldier. Jefferson: Liked to run around naked in the woods with the help. Grant: Drank like the liquor store was about to close. Kennedy: High on Painkillers, high on pussy, just high on life, I guess. Roosevelt: Drank a shitload. Also a gimp. Lincoln: Wife was crazier than Theresa Kerry, liked theatre productions (i.e. potentially gay). LBJ: Had an ongoing affair with secretary. Liked to beat small children and puppies at his ranch. Anyway, notice a decline in leadership in America - I'm looking at you Americans? Yes, you do. Why? Because everyone has to be so fucking melba toast that there can't be anything in their past that might offend someone, somewhere. The truth of the matter is great people, whether they be Presidents, hairdressers, teachers, inventors, etc. are generally passionate people. They're flawed - just like everyone else. The moment that the 'job' includes every possible moment of everyday, we now find the only people that are employable are ones that go to work, love their spouse, and never go out or fuck up in any way possible. Or, we ask people to get very good at lying to us to give us the above perception. So Americans, and employers, I give you what you wanted: Perfect employees - completely and utterly perfunctory and criminally boring in their private lives, risk averse, lacking passion or ambition or any edge to them that may offend someone, somewhere, someday, or Perfect Liars - employees that can pretend they are the prior category. Good luck with that.
It's been over twenty years since we had a President who wasn't an admitted drug user in office. And for eight of those years, our president was a well known philanderer. For another eight, he was an alcoholic. Newt Gingich gets a new wife every time I blink, and John McCain is only slightly less womanizing. Our current Vice President is basically America's favorite creepy drunk uncle. Yeah, we sure did stop forgiving the past transgressions of our leaders.
I think it was the fact that the company's name got in the news (in a negative light) because of that guy, that got him fired, rather than the guy was fired because he displayed a lack of judgment. If the company's name wasn't brought up, he'd probably still have a job. Using that company's presumed rationale as a basis for "what level of stupid does it take to get you fired?": if you do something dumb/illegal enough that the identity of your employer becomes part of the story, then your employer has the right to fire you. I don't agree with that as a cutoff for all cases, but as a general rule of thumb, I think it sounds about right for most.
Overall, outside of extreme cases, unless I'm on the clock, fuck you. Why? Because go fuck yourself. No further explanation deserved or offered. And here's where this becomes yet another example of the media being assholes. If the original story is at all accurate, the guy is guilty of being an asshole on a plane. The reporter in turn acted like just as much of an asshole by bringing the company's name into it, something completely unrelated to the story, effectively forcing the company's hand.
Maybe reporters are fully aware of this power they wield and use it against people they find particularly despicable. HMMM.
Wow, I absolutely did not even consider that. I guess I was busy taking that as a fact the obviousness of which is on par with the fact that the sun is bright, while trying to make the more relevant to my argument point that the reporter has no right; I'll take that a step further and suggest that this case is an excellent example of public opinion being easily focused by media for their personal or political aims - for instance, the public outrage that would have been generated against this company would have been overwhelming (HMM) which is a big part of, if not all of he was fired. In comparison, how many people care about or even know about Congress stalling and bickering on budget issues but still having no problem working across the aisle on issues like CISPA or (this is an old one, but I recall it getting about as much coverage as a dog pissing on a fire hydrant) giving a giant middle finger to 9/11 first responders? What about the Violence Against Women Act, how much coverage is that getting (if at all) beyond use as another divisive issue? See, there's an entire warehouse full of cans of worms we can open on this one, but I really just wanted to make the point that the original asshole in this story was already facing legal charges, had a chance of being fired, and Jimmy the Newsroom boy decides that it is Jimmy's decision alone to ensure that this guy faces Jimmy's choice of consequences for something he hasn't even been convicted of to someone Jimmy has never and will never meet. Yeah, go Jimmy, right?
There isn't much of a split in my personal and professional life. M pretty okay with it, but people not inside don't quite seem to grasp the whole thing about "if you are in charge of a lot of people, you need to follow the rules yourself to be competent in your position". A core part of my job is handling a lot of narcotics and controlled drugs. It is reasonable to assume that if I did drugs on my time off, I would be at risk of diverting those meds onto the street. People with security clearances can't have large debts and affairs because those are huge targets for blackmail, even if it is "personal". Neat fact, a few years ago an executive got drunk and hit on a very junior employee - in a very crude way, so I hear - in the room I'm sitting in now. It made headlines when it happened. He resigned out of shame rather than face the shit that was coming to him. Yes, these kinds of people need to be gotten rid of, they poison the workplace, set bad examples, and destroy morale when they get away with it. Plus, that guy who started beating a kid in the airplane - you really think he was an absolute angel at work? Do you want him making an important decision when he's under stress? I know I don't.