Your management’s policy on discussing wages being an “offense punishable by termination of employment” is illegal and violates the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. This act specifically protects employees’ right to discuss “wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment for their ‘mutual aid or protection.’” Management sometimes commits the error of believing this only applies to unionized workers, but that is untrue, as the courts have ruled many times.
For over 25 years, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that forbidding workers to discuss wages is explicitly in violation of the NLRA. If a company’s employment handbook contains any language of this nature, it is required by law to be removed. The policy does not have to be written, however, as in NLRB vs. Main Street Terrace Care Center, where an “unwritten” policy of the same nature was found to be in violation of the same federal law. The only time preventing employees from disclosing wages is legal is when it constitutes a legitimate business concern, as with payroll or HR employees. Preventing “hard feelings” among employees is not considered to be a legitimate business concern from the perspective of the federal government.
Management will sometimes claim that Alabama, being an “at-will” state, allows them to fire you for any reason. This is also untrue. Realize first that every state besides Montana is an “at-will” state. More importantly, being “at-will” allows employers to fire you for any reason THAT IS NOT ILLEGAL. Firing an employee for being a certain race or sex is illegal, as is firing an employee for discussing his or her wages or benefits.
If you are fired for this reason, or any other illegal reason, you can take Best Buy to court, and you will win.
Of course, management can always make up a reason to fire you, but they will have to commit perjury in court to maintain that lie, and cases have been won in circumstances where it seems likely that the employer fired someone for illegal reasons. Your case doesn’t have to be “air tight”; it is up to the court to decide if your story sounds more legitimate than Best Buy’s. As always, any evidence you can collect can help you.
(Note that in Alabama it is legal to record a conversation without the other party’s knowledge or consent. Only one party of the conversation must know about the recording. So you can record a conversation you are having with someone else, but not a recording two other people are having, without at least one of the participant’s consent.)
In this economy, employers are looking to use fear of unemployment to their advantage. Do not let them do this. Best Buy has made record profits recently, and they are still firing their labor and reducing worker benefits while the majority is too scared to speak up. Speak up! We only have rights if we work to defend them.
Sincerely,
Concerned Former Best Buy Employee
(Note: This is referring to my time working at the Best Buy in Tuscaloosa, AL on McFarland Blvd. Other Best Buys’ management may not have this policy. Ask your local Best Buy if their management does this, and if they do, inform them that you disapprove and will be sure to spend your money elsewhere.)
Here is my explanation of why the rich should pay a higher tax rate. This is probably really obvious to most people, but many of my friends seem to “not get it” so here we go:
If you are trying to determine a rate at which to tax your population, what are you considering? Are you thinking first about how much government services will cost, then splitting up the cost among the population? Maybe, but it seems more likely that you will fit your costs to your income, like how companies and individuals manage their finances. You don’t enter the job market as a college graduate thinking “I want a house that costs $350,000 and a car that costs $30,000 and I want to go out to nice restaurants twice a week… so according to my calculations I must seek a job making $200,000 a year!” You may think about these things, but you’re not going to commit to a lifestyle like this without first seeing how much money you can actually get. If your English degree can only get you $30,000 a year, you’ll likely scale back your spending and stick to a more modest lifestyle, right? So the real question you start with is: How much income can we expect, or, said another way, How much can people afford to contribute to the government?
But what does it MEAN to say “how much can people afford”? Technically, everyone can afford to pay ANY tax rate, since the tax rate is simply a percentage of what they already have. So a 100% tax rate is “affordable,” but that’s not really what we mean. What we are talking about when discussing how much people can afford to pay in taxes is how much can we tax people without negatively impacting their quality of life?
Of course, taxing someone any amount is taking away from money they can choose to spend elsewhere. In that sense, it will always negatively impact their bank account. But the government is providing services that improve people’s quality of life, like roads, schools, law enforcement, Social Security, a military, etc. If you had no government, people’s quality of life would surely suffer, so a tax rate of 0% would actually hurt them. So some percentage above 0%, but lower than 100%, is desired. The question here is where is the equilibrium rate where the people have the best quality of life?
To figure out this equilibrium rate where the people are best off, we have to know how much they have to start with. But people have a wide variety of different incomes. At the bottom end of the spectrum, many people cannot afford to feed themselves or their families. If we based our equilibrium tax rate on the bottom end of the spectrum, we couldn’t have a government.
Other people have a huge income, on the order of millions of dollars, where they could afford to feed and clothe their families many times over if we taxed them at 99%. Not only that, but after making a certain amount of money, you stop having to worry about the necessities of life like food and shelter, and start spending money on luxury items. It doesn’t seem like we should be as concerned about, say, a yacht, as we would a family dying of preventable disease. But of course, if we based our equilibrium tax rate on that end of the spectrum, those at the bottom and middle would suffer greatly, and experience a net loss of quality of life.
It seems basing our tax rate on the middle of the spectrum is very inefficient as well, since the bottom still couldn’t pay without hurting themselves, and the top has a ton of untapped income that could be used to improve everyone’s quality of life–including the super rich themselves. It doesn’t seem to make much sense at all to tax everyone at the same rate, knowing all of this.
Surely the best solution is to have different tax rates across the board, where each person contributes according what they can afford to contribute without experiencing a net loss of quality of life.
Reason #1: Our military harms many times more innocents than “enemies:”
Gen. David Petraeus released figures to the news media that claimed spectacular success for raids by Special Operations Forces: in a 90-day period from May through July, SOF units had captured 1,355 rank-and-file Taliban, killed another 1,031, and killed or captured 365 middle- or high-ranking Taliban.
The claims of huge numbers of Taliban captured and killed continued through the rest of 2010. In December, Petraeus’s command said a total of 4,100 Taliban rank and file had been captured in the previous six months and 2,000 had been killed.
Those figures were critical to creating a new media narrative hailing the success of SOF operations as reversing what had been a losing U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.
But it turns out that more than 80 percent of those called captured Taliban fighters were released within days of having been picked up, because they were found to have been innocent civilians, according to official U.S. military data.
Reason #2: Our military functions as a force of global empire-expansion. (We’re never leaving.):
When Obama began his Presidency there were close to 38,000 troops in Afghanistan. If he keeps the promises that he will make in his speech tonight, eighteen months months from now, after withdrawing, or reclassifying, 30,000 troops, there will still be 68,000 troops left in Afghanistan.
Reason #3: Anyone with enough oil can hire our military as their own security firm:
Despite their deepening political divide, the United States and Saudi Arabia are quietly expanding defense ties on a vast scale, led by a little-known project to develop an elite force to protect the kingdom’s oil riches and future nuclear sites.
[...]The special security force is expected to grow to at least 35,000 members, trained and equipped by U.S. personnel as part of a multiagency effort that includes staff from the Justice Department, Energy Department and Pentagon. It is overseen by the U.S. Central Command.
I grew up on video games, immersed in a world that contained as many second chances as I wanted to take. If I messed up, I simply reverted back to a previous state–before I messed up. Tough boss fight ahead? Save game. Didn’t go as well as I’d like? 
Load game, retry. Sure, I might occasionally lose out on an hour or two of progress, but in the scope of my 40+ hour game, that was nothing. The first trick a gamer learns is to save often, and in consecutive slots to avoid overwriting a save that you may need to revert back to later on. Sometime saving itself can be an error, after all.
But something I am having to learn is that life does not have this option. You cannot throw yourself at a large obstacle unprepared, unthinking, and merely hope for the best. Every failing sticks–permanently. What’s more, it really is possible to mess up so badly that you spend the rest of your life suffering for it. The stakes for your life are as high as they can possibly be: your life, and the life of everyone you care about. This goes for small matters like what classes to take, and large ones like what to commit your life to. You only get one shot.
I think about the claims of ordinary Christians, and I worry about how shallow life must feel to them. How inconsequential. From their perspective, there is an eternal do-over waiting for them after death. Say your prayers, read your Bible, and everything else simply works out fine. This kind of thinking makes it impossible to take any threat very seriously, even global ones.
Jesus coming back to bail us out of global warming, or a quick soft-reset to bail us out of missable items, the psychology is the same, but the end results cannot be more different: real life is real.
It was the History channel that shocked me into this reality that I was not confronting honestly. It was a special about the construction of the ancient Egyptian pyramids. One thing they would do is drop down a wedge-shaped stone into an opening it barely fit into, and could never be retrieved once dropped.
About 15 billion years ago, after nothingness fluctuated in the quantum way required to do so, our universe sprang from a point and expanded. Energy, having the properties that it does (or properties, having the energy that they do) settled into matter, the matter into other kinds of matter, and 10 billion years later there is a sun with planets orbiting around it. No one said “let there be light,” or approved of the processes that occurred. They happened, and morality, being a property of minds, did not exist yet, as minds did not exist.
Our planet was one that had properties that allowed for specific kinds of processes to occur on its surface that did not occur elsewhere. Likewise, there are many more specific processes that occur elsewhere that cannot happen on our planet. Some of those processes on ours are interesting to us, however, as it led to bits of matter that replicated. Replication leads to life, and life to us. At every stage, we can draw little dividing lines and say this was when the universe birthed this, this , and this. We can say, “There are those kinds of things and over here are these kinds of things, quite distinct from those.” Yet we haven’t lost the knowledge that everything is the result of the same physical processes and composed of the same basic stuff as everything else. Everything is different; everything is the same.
We can examine the universe at every scale, from the quantum to the astronomical, and recognize that the names we give things are really the names we give organizations of other things.
Recognizing the whole as the sum of its parts is a big challenge for humans, in every area of understanding. Maybe it’s a physical limitation of human brains, or something that can be overcome with training that no one in history has developed yet. In any case, most of our time in learning seems to be spent equating one thing as actually being many other things, which before we believed to be unrelated. Example: We don’t fall through the floor for the same reason we are protected from solar winds while on earth, which is the same reason magnetized needles all point to a certain spot on earth, which is the same reason birds have the ability to navigate over long distances.
Now, we can look at organization of things relevant to our lives in many ways, but I want to talk about one specific way.
Energy -> Matter -> Life -> Humans
Pretty simple words for a ridiculously complicated process. But the question I want the reader to consider is: What’s next?
If a collection of energy makes matter, and a collection of matter makes life, and a collection of life makes humans (see: this, this, and maybe this), then what is a collection of humans? At this point we are defining these things united by a premise that bounds its existence. All matter is energy, but not all energy is matter. Likewise, there are many kinds of life that exist that are not humans. You can certainly have collections of humans, then, that exist but are not particularly noteworthy. The question becomes: what are the persisting human collectives, the ones that have real influence?
