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.

And good for the credit union, they did.

Now she’s unemployed.