Firing Employers May be Judgment Proof – What Nudist Employees Need to Know

I accepted, and then turned down, an assignment at Textbroker.  The topic was about nudists who had lost their jobs because of their affiliation with nudist associations, or use of nudist beaches.  The legal implications were also to be discussed.  When I couldn’t find anything, including FindLaw, online, I rejected the assignment. 

I still thought about it, though.  I read a few articles on different sites and decided I wanted to write about it, but more from a perspective of what was gained just from a gleaning of these articles by a paralegal. 

The results I came away with is that yes, a nudist can be fired for being a nudist, even if it does not affect the employee’s individual work performance.  The firing company needs to have a reason in many states, including at-will states, and still might face a fight if someone feels determined enough to start a law suit.  Some employees, though, might feel that the press their case would receive could keep them from getting another job, and decide to not pursue legal action.  Some might wonder if the lack of references from that company might cause them to find it harder to obtain new employment, and this is a valid concern.

A Workable Defense an Employer Might Use.

If the employer engages in business with certain groups of people or other organizations, the way they are perceived by the people in those groups or organizations affects how those people engage in business with the company.  If families and individual children, as students, interact with a school in order to provide educational instruction, and then parents find out that a teacher marched nude in a parade for nudists’ rights, the school’s image is now different, and is known as ‘that school with the nudist teaching’ and you fill in the subject he or she taught. 

Wal-Mart wouldn’t have the same amount of leeway in firing someone.  You might get a snicker here and there about the law-a-way clerk who let it slip she got an all over body tan at a nude beach.  Business isn’t going to drop for Wal-Mart.  A school, while providing an education to children, have an obligation to not go against the wishes of parents (even though schools aren’t always as helpful in all situations) and to take into consideration how other employees are going to look at the situation.  They  may be concerned that some similarity (same subjects taught, in the same block of time, the same grade level, etcetera) might cause some people to think they are ‘that teacher’ and this can affect teachers’ performance in the classroom.