Employment tribunal celebrates modern working practices: Reactionary customers urged to duck

The doughty inhabitants of Eastleigh, Hampshire have been treated to a fine live pantomime, courtesy of our sexual discrimination laws and employment tribunal, this Christmas. It’s the heart-warming story of Caroline Gardner, shop worker at Booker Cash and Carry and lesbian (this is an important plot hook), and her fight, backed by just the entire UK government, against the patriarchy of a local shop.

The story begins whilst our heroine is doing her work, when enters a Reactionary Bigoted Man (boo hiss!). Failing to find any lime cordial in the shop, he becomes somewhat annoyed, and allegedly refers to our Caroline as a “filthy dyke” and allegedly pushes her back. Rising manfully (whoops!) to the occasion, our Caroline lobs a bag of flour at the back of his head (she’s behind you!).

The second scene took place in the store manager’s office, where Caroline, eschewing the male, patriarchal, oppressive mode of argumentation, took a lunge at the RBM’s throat area. The store manager fires her.

But all is made well in the final scene, where a chorus of feminists, employment tribunaries and employment rights advocates declaim that our heroine was unfairly dismissed. Thoroughly modern stuff for all the family.

Is it unreasonable to fire a worker for lashing out at an abusive customer? There’s the old principle that the customer is always right to argue against that. Moreover, it is surely the store manager’s business how he runs the shop. If he judges his employee to have been remiss in her duties, it is his right, and duty to his bosses and share-holders, to terminate her employment. If he makes poor decisions, it’s his business that suffers. That’s how free enterprise works.

Past employment tribunal decisions may have weakened this basis for Western prosperity. This is the first one, however, to state it quite so clearly: some can, nay have a government-gifted right to, indulge in assault and battery without any ill consequences to themselves.

It’s not just free enterprise that has received a blow from the meddling feminists of the employment tribunal. Freedom of association itself - that hoary old ideal for which Iron Curtains have fallen - has been quietly shunted away into the graveyard of unfashionable political notions.

This will prove to be a great loss. The freedom to not associate with the anti-social and the socially destructive is the basis for any sort of civilized order. Without it, the incentives to pursue the civic and commercial virtues of diligence, honesty and reliability disappear: why be good at one’s job and pleasant to one’s superiors and customers if there is no threat of censure?

The final, yet unshown act of the pantomime is a tragic one. In it, business, and indeed any sort of civil association, becomes increasingly difficult, ever threatened as it will be by discrimination lawsuits and tribunals. Meanwhile, irresponsible behaviour will become ever easier, protected as it will be by the very same lawsuits and tribunals.

Napoleon once reviled Britain as “a nation of shopkeepers”. Today’s professional lefties are ever intent on solving the problem identified by their radical hero. Soon, the shopkeepers will be replaced by the shop-wreckers.

Welcome to our brave new world, gentlemen, where throwing a flour bag at a customer’s head is just another lifestyle choice. Please abandon out-dated bourgeoisie notions on the way in.

If brought to the general attention, this decision might have two salutary effects. First, it might act as a wake-up to conservative and old liberal civil libertarians. This was done in the name of rights. Rights no longer have their Burkean meaning of limitations on government power and protectors of peaceful conduct. In an irony worthy of Orwell, they are now aggrandisements of government power and protectors of violent conduct.

Secondly, this decision might shatter the myth of Homophobic Britain. As this decision shows, its new rulers have no problems with sex between consenting adults. To paraphrase Nozick, it’s business between consenting adults that they feel a bit queasy about.

Posted by Alex Zeka on Wednesday, January 4, 2006 at 08:38 AM in Marxism & Culture War
Comments (2) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Next entry: Tech Tip: Save Streaming Media

Previous entry: Lunar House