Can You Really Shut Down Your Company a Week After Your Workers Unionize?
American labor laws normally protect workers from retaliation for unionizing, but billionaire CEO Joe Ricketts seems to have used a dramatic exception when he closed his news websites after some workers voted to unionize: A business may always close its operations entirely.
Francie Diep, a reporter for the Pacific Standard, writes that all of the publcations’ offices — including those in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, which had not voted to unionize — are now closed.
“If lawyers decide to pursue a case charging that Ricketts acted illegally, they’ll have to prove that some part of the business is still operating — say, if Ricketts were tied to another media company somehow — or that, after the shutdown, Ricketts opened up a similar business elsewhere,” Diep writes.
Read the Pacific Standard article.
