Remember Al Franken? He was a distinguished United States senator. He is funny. He is charming. No one else in Congress could or can excoriate hypocritical right-wing nincompoops quite so effectively.
Then an old photograph circulated that showed him, during his time as a comedian, with a big goofy grin on his face pretending to grope the breasts of a Playboy model who was on tour with him to help entertain the troops. Specifically, she was on the tour to entertain the troops with her good looks, which certainly doesn’t mean she deserved to be the butt of a bad joke executed while she was sleeping in a flak jacket.
After this, seven additional women accused Franken of unwanted touching. While no one should touch anyone else in a way that makes them uncomfortable, none of these were even close to the most heinous allegations you’ve heard, and Franken strongly denied any intent at least to overstep personal boundaries. Franken was a very public-facing lawmaker who met thousands and thousands of people, including me, meaning that if he really was out there trying to make a grope-fest of things, there probably would have been a lot more than seven complainants.
Then 36 Democrats demanded he resign. He succumbed to the pressure. We all got a lackluster replacement.
The point of this little stroll down memory lane is that none of this had anything to do with Franken’s performance as a senator. Sure, there is a point at which general misbehavior should lead to you losing your job, like for instance when you’ve engaged in any one of the dozens of felonies that the current president has been convicted of and/or charged with. But does anyone else out there remember a time when people would occasionally get fired for being bad at their jobs instead of for some other judgmental reason that has nothing to do with their job performance?
Think about it. When was the last time you heard of someone getting fired for actually being bad at their job? Coldplay kiss cam couple: having an affair, probably bad spouses, potential conflicts of interest, but seemingly doing fine at their jobs before anyone knew all this. Fed Governor Lisa Cook: maybe did mortgage fraud. Sandwich guy: threw a sandwich at an ICE agent like a f*cking hero. All the people let go for gleefully posting about Charlie Kirk’s assassination: I mean, I’m just going to decline to comment on that one.
Plugging The Profit Leaks: How Your Firm Can Stop Burning Money
Join the webinar on September 25th and learn some quick wins you can implement right away.
I could go on all day with these examples. Perhaps “idiot loses job because he was so terrible at it” simply does not make the headlines, but even in my real life it’s hard to remember any recent terminations for actual performance-related reasons.
Way back in the day, when I worked at a law firm that fired hapless associates on a whim nearly every month, there was this guy who got fired in large part because he wrote a memo of law in which he intentionally left out the most important controlling case on the key issue, causing a partner who didn’t check the work to get yelled at and humiliated in open court during oral arguments. The guy said he left the most important case imaginable out because it was such a bad precedent for our side. On days like that, it could really feel like going to law school was worth it.
Look, people should be held accountable for particularly bad outside-of-the-workplace behavior. There are lots of systems in place for holding people accountable for bad behavior that are not employers showing them the door in order to impose some kind of faceless corporate moral judgment on everyone.
Al Franken should have apologized, and he did. Al Franken should have faced ethical inquiries, and he did. He should not have lost his job. He lost a lot. We, the American people, lost even more.
Little versions of Franken’s saga play themselves out in offices all across America every day. So many of them are lose-lose situations, just like it was with Franken. Between everyone’s family and everyone’s social media addictions, it seems to me we all already have plenty of people judging our every decision at every moment without employers needing to be in on the game. It would be nice if we could go back to employers worrying about how good you are at your job and leaving the moral policing with the almighty where it belongs.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].