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If you thought your employers seeing red can cost your job, here’s a new one for you – you lose your job even if your employers “see orange.” At least that’s what a number of employees of the Deerfield Beach law firm Elizabeth R. Wellborn P.A. found out last week.
All employees found wearing orange shirts on payday were fired without explanation according to absolute discretion afforded to employers in Florida. As explained to the media by Eric K. Gabrielle, a labor and employment lawyer, Florida law states that without a specific contract to the contrary, an employer can fire a worker “for a good reason, for a bad reason or even the wrong reason, as long as it’s not an unlawful reason.”
Apparently, wearing orange shirts to work was held as sufficient reason to sack workers by the law firm.
As the story unfolds, from the side of the workers expressions were of stunned disbelief over employer reaction. According to the workers, wearing orange shirts to psyche out on payday had become a growing fashion within the company starting with four workers wearing orange shirts on happy hour, and this Friday it ended up with fourteen employees adopting the fashion to celebrate happy hour as a group.
Employers asked the employees to a meeting room, asked them whether it was some sort of protest, to which all replied in the negative, and then the firm fired all employees found wearing an orange shirt.
Workers were stunned as Lou Erik, a paralegal wearing an orange shirt commented, “There is no office policy against wearing orange shirts. We had no warning. We got no severance, no package, no nothing … I feel so violated.” But that is fully legal in Florida.
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Fifty-year old Janice Doble, who lost her job used to supervise 12 employees in the document copying and mailing department of the firm. She is doubly worried, whether the employers are misinterpreting as the workers having some agenda, and what will happen to her four kids who still work at the firm.
Well, it’s better to get kids out of the grips of employers who see orange.
Yadel Fong, 21 is wondering what happened. He was unaware of any protest or symbolic association with wearing orange shirts except some employees celebrated as a group on happy hour.
The employers have been unavailable for comment, but it is understood that they held wearing orange shirts by a number of employees on payday as some sort of protest in spite of specific denials or in the absence of any claims or demands on part of the workers who were wearing orange shirts.
It can happen that someday those law firm executives may decide all workers wearing pants involves some sort of protest through participating in wearing common styles of attire – then those employees are sure going to lose their pants.
