Captain Fear
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- Mar 20, 2019
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A long list of major U.S. companies have joined in an important legal brief aimed at securing federal protection against employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. That list does not include the NFL or any of its teams.
Via Ernest Hooper of the Tampa Bay Times, only two major American sports teams signed the “amicus” brief, a common device for parties who aren’t directly involved in a controversy to chime in with their support for one position or another. Those teams are baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays and San Francisco Giants.
Other companies to sign the amicus brief supporting the extension of civil-rights protection to sexual orientation and gender identity include, per Hooper, Amazon, American Airlines, Bank of America, Ben & Jerry’s, Coca-Cola, Domino’s Pizza, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Nike, Starbucks, Viacom, the Walt Disney Co., and Xerox.
“Signing the brief was not only the right thing to do, but is also best for our business,” Brian Auld, Rays president told Hooper. “We encourage other sports teams and organizations to support this protection for fans, employees and their families.”
It’s not just the NFL and its teams that passed on signing the brief. No NBA teams and no NHL teams signed it, and most MLB teams also opted to stay out of it.
Most employers resist any expansion of the list of exceptions to the traditional concept of employment at will. As the list grows, the freedom of employers to do what they want becomes reduced, more i’s need to be dotted and more t’s need to be crossed before employees can be terminated, and the risk of wrongful-discharge lawsuits increases.
Still, some societal issues take precedence over the knee-jerk desire to protect corporate coffers. Plenty of major businesses clearly believe this is one of them. The NFL, along with most other sports leagues and teams, does not.