Small business owners and corporations across the nation are informing their employees that if President Obama is re-elected and Obamacare is fully implemented, they will lose hours, health care coverage and management bonuses. I call this coercion. Because of a Supreme Court ruling in 2010, referred to as Citizens United, this is legal.
Law experts say “Citizens United frees companies to propagandize their employees with their political preferences.” Before the decision, businesses were prohibited from instructing their employees to vote a certain way. This presidential election is the first to allow employer coercion and it is a tool that is being widely used by companies of every size across our nation.
Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, told a group of business executives from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) on a conference call in June 2012 to “make it very clear to [their] employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections.”
To coerce is to "force to act or think in a certain way by use of pressure, threats, or intimidation." Just because one has the right to coerce his or her employees to support one's political agenda doesn't make it ethically right. It is ethically wrong to bully people in the workforce to vote for your candidate if you are an employer by threatening them with job, compensation or benefits loss.
Further, it is wrong to blame voters for the choices businesses make. The employer, not the voter, takes personal responsibility for the choices [s]he makes relative to their business. I don't get to vote on how you run your business, what profit margin is acceptable or how many people at what rate you employ. You don't run a democracy, you run a business. Run it how you want. Make the choices you need to. But take personal responsibility for your own business - don't blame your business decisions on me, the voter.
It is your choice to pass all the associated costs of a fully implemented Obamacare program to your employees. You could choose to shoulder some of the burden yourself. How can you innovate a new way to do business to keep your profit margin high? Could you raise prices to maintain your high profit margins?
A note: after sharing this common practice with a friend of mine who was undecided, she has decided to support the candidate who does not encourage coercion. She will cast her vote to re-elect President Obama.
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