Hesen Jabr, a labor and delivery nurse, was recently honored by her employer, NYU Langone Health in New York, for her work with grieving mothers who had lost babies during pregnancy and childbirth. A supervisor read from a note that said Jabr “not only provides stellar patient care, but also provides support for the rest of the nursing staff so that we can all live up to her example”. Jabr, who is Palestinian American, graciously accepted the award and took the opportunity to devote a small portion of her remarks to draw a connection with grieving mothers in Gaza.
When she reported to her first shift back at work, however, she was sent to meet with senior leadership at the hospital. Her bosses, she has said, told her she had “put others at risk”, “ruined the ceremony” and “offended people” with her remarks. She was sent back to work but several hours later was read a termination letter and escorted out by a police officer. NYU Langone told the New York Times that Jabr was fired for bringing “her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace”.
This isn’t the institution’s first bit of trouble with speech. Langone faces a lawsuit from a prominent cancer researcher who was fired after posting anti-Hamas political cartoons that administrators deemed racist. Another doctor was briefly “removed from service”, according to the New York Times, after being accused of posting messages to social media perceived as supporting Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.
The problem goes far beyond NYU Langone. Looking around the world, it’s easy to find examples of state authoritarianism. Citizens in countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran face lengthy prison terms or even death for exercising their basic human rights. Thankfully, in the United States, we don’t have to worry about being locked up for tweeting the wrong thing or joining the wrong civil society organization.
But despite our protection from public tyranny as citizens, as workers we face forms of private tyranny on a grand scale. A full quarter of private-sector workers have said that they have received political messages or requests from their employers; some workers report extreme instances of being fired for having the wrong message or candidate on their bumper sticker.
In a country where “at-will” employment is the norm and only 6% of private-sector employees are unionized, so much of our lives depend on being in the good graces of our bosses. Most people would accept having to hit reasonable performance targets to keep their jobs, but the control and surveillance of ordinary Americans has gone far beyond that.
Critics, many of them on the right, have decried a broader “cancel culture”. They’re correct that some prominent cultural figures were the objects of moral panics during our “Great Awokening”. But conservative commentators tend to pay almost no attention to people like Adam Smith, who was fired by his employer for a pro-gay rights protest at Chick-fil-A or the literally hundreds of academic workers retaliated against for their views.
We often hear about the absurdities of “woke Twitter mobs”, but in reality their power pales in comparison with institutions like the NBA, which condemned Daryl Morey, then Rockets general manager, for opposing Beijing’s clampdown in Hong Kong, or Starbucks, which allegedly fired or reduced the hours of hundreds of workers who were involved in union drives or complaining about their wages.
Liberals, too, have to realize that calling upon employers to fire workers for even offensive speech outside the workplace is an implicit endorsement of the power and control that our bosses have over our lives. The same is true of the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) push at many firms, which goes far beyond commonsense anti-harassment training and has been explicitly used to divide workers and undermine unionization efforts.
Even more modest anti-racism trainings, Jennifer Pan has argued, “demand access to workers’ thoughts and feelings on highly charged topics, usually in the presence of their supervisors, and evaluate those workers’ responses, often with the explicit goal of generating discomfort”. It should come as no surprise that Donald Trump’s National Labor Relations Board allowed companies to fire workers who used “racist” or “profane” speech in union-related activity.
All this should make ordinary Americans shudder. Part of what people all around the world admire about the United States is how dynamic our society is. We’re keen to express ourselves, talk to strangers and engage with people of different backgrounds. The media might portray Americans as irreconcilably polarized, but most of us value the democratic rights and civil liberties that past generations fought to enshrine.
We should carve out a bipartisan consensus that workers shouldn’t lose their livelihoods for having political and social opinions. A small victory in this direction would be NYU Langone offering to reinstate Hesen Jabr, so she can continue to devote herself to the mothers and babies who need her care.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin, and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities
