Amid this year’s dark and divisive presidential election, the 2012 campaign can feel like a distant memory.
But four years ago this month, a flurry of stories focused in on corporate chief executives who were ominously telling their workers what might happen if President Obama won a second term.
If that happened, the chief executive of Westgate Resorts said, he would have “no choice but to reduce the size of this company.” The chief executive of a software company in Florida warned that “if the U.S. re-elects President Obama, [the company’s] chances of staying independent are slim to none.”
And Mitt Romney himself encouraged business owners to “make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections.”
While 2016 hasn’t brought the same kind of headlines, it’s not because the law has really changed. It is still legal for corporations to advocate for specific candidates when communicating with their rank-and-file employees.
Private employers can distribute materials that tell all their workers the company’s positions on political issues. And if your boss were to send an email urging you to attend a rally for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton this weekend, because electing their favorite candidate is “essential for the future of the company,” legal experts say they would be within their rights.
As this heated election sprints to the finish line, it’s impossible to game out every situation employees might face. While many workers may never hear a political pitch from their boss, it can still be surprising to hear what workers and their employers can and can’t do when it comes to mixing politics and work. (That is, if they work for a private employer; government workers have much more in the way of protections.
Some rules are also different for union workers.) Six years after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision gave employers greater ability to express their political views and engage in unlimited “independent” political spending, experts say some legal questions remain unresolved, leaving gray areas and gaps in regulation that could leave workers at risk.
In a private company, employees are often surprised to hear they don’t have the First Amendment rights they do outside the workplace, says Lindsay Burke, vice chair of the employment law practice at Covington & Burling. Companies can’t prohibit workers from talking about labor issues and working conditions during workplace breaks, so a cafeteria debate over Trump’s position on the minimum wage or water cooler chatter over Clinton’s parental leave policies should be protected.
But employers can ban staffers from soliciting donations from their co-workers for political candidates. And technically, companies could ban other political speech in the workplace, even if few of them try to police it.
Read more of the original article at The Washington Post.
