Certain revisionist historians from the nether side of the Mason-Dixon line may disagree, but it has long been my understanding that the United States fought a long and lethal war about slavery. In late 1860 and early 1861, Southern states passed ordinances of secession to protect their “peculiar institution” from the “Black Republicans” led by Abraham Lincoln, and the duly elected government of the United States acted to preserve the Union.
Within months after that war ended, after four years and 215,000 deaths in battle, slavery was forever banned in this nation.
Or so I thought, until reading about some litigation coming out of Weld County. Russ Hopkins worked for American Eagle Distributing Co., which distributes not eagles, but Budweiser beer to taverns and liquor stores.
His side of the story is that he was a dutiful employee who did his job. He was off the job on the night of May 17, 2003, when he took his girlfriend to a bar in Greeley.
When the waitress delivered the second round of beers, Hopkins ended up with a bottle of Coors, and went to work on it because he didn’t want to wait, even though that wasn’t what he ordered.
With Coors in hand, he was invited to another table where he met the son-in-law of Jerry Helgeson, the president of American Eagle Distributing. The son-in-law offered to buy Hopkins a new beer, but he declined, saying, “I’m fine, thanks,” and declined again a few minutes later.
Hopkins returned to his own table. On the following Monday, he was fired. He said he was told that drinking a Coors was “putting food on the competitor’s table while we are putting food on your own.”
American Eagle has responded to Hopkins’ suit, saying his dismissal was legitimate because there was an appearance of conflict of interest, and his conduct was related to “a bona fide occupational requirement.”
How does this connect with slavery?
It seems fair that if you’re on company time, you go by the company rules, and if you don’t like those rules, you can find another company. (Some of us, I might note, are so incapable of proper corporate behavior that we have to be self-employed. It’s a non-medical condition known as “extremely low crap tolerance.”)
The rules do get enforced, at least on underlings. A survey released Wednesday by the American Management Association showed that 26 percent of the surveyed companies have fired employees for misusing the Internet. E-mail abuse led to dismissals in 25 percent of the firms, and 6 percent had fired people for misusing office telephones.
But what about what you do on your own time? A job, after all, is supposed to occupy only a portion of your waking hours. It’s one thing to forbid smoking at the workplace, but should Weyco, a Michigan benefits-administration company, have been able to fire four people who smoked in their own homes on their own time? Should an Alabama woman have been fired last fall for having a John Kerry bumper sticker on her car?
If there’s no such thing as your own time or your own house or your own car, if everything is under the control of your employer, then where’s the line between employment and slavery? If American Eagle expected Hopkins to perform certain actions, shouldn’t he have been drawing pay for the time he was in the bar?
And there’s another troubling aspect to this incident, at least if we go by Hopkins’ account. He said he didn’t want another beer when he was offered a Bud, and the owner’s son-in-law kept trying to get him to take another. Don’t we have enough trouble with drunken driving without beer distribution executives’ relatives going to bars and pushing people to drink more, even after they say they’ve had enough?
There was a time when I believed that this was settled 140 years ago: No American should have to heed Massa unless he is drawing pay at the time. But it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.
Ed Quillen of Salida is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
