can you fire someone for being racist?
A reader writes:
Recently, my company hired someone who was extremely racist. He worked with me on his first day, where he dropped an awful racial slur six times. I was shocked so did a little social media sleuthing and found his horrifying Twitter page full of xenophobic and racist tweets and posts. We fired him.
However, after speaking to a friend who is in HR, she said we couldn’t simply fire him for being racist. Now, obviously our lawyer and HR rep disagreed with that because he was fired. But what say you? Are racist posts and hate speech enough to fire someone? She seems to think we should have put him on an improvement plan first. I think at that point it’s too late and having a racist employee puts our employees of color at risk unnecessarily. I am proud of the way the company handled it, but she thinks we opened ourselves up to legal liability. She said his racism was apart of his “political opinion” and you can’t fire someone over their political opinion. But “racist” is hardly a political opinion, it’s hate speech. So, I won’t ask if we were “wrong” to fire him, but could we have potentially opened ourselves up to legal issues by firing him based solely on racist tweets and his racist comments said to me but directed at other people?
I answer this question over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.
