Here is a cut and paste from The Toronto Star:
Fourteen employees at a Florida law firm are claiming they have been fired for wearing orange shirts.
The group all wear the shirts on pay-day Friday’s because they go out to Happy Hour together after work, they told the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.
The tradition had gone on for a few months before management at the law firm of Elizabeth R. Wellborn called them into a conference room last Friday and fired them for being involved in a protest by wearing orange.
“There is no office policy against wearing orange shirts. We had no warning. We got no severance, no package, no nothing,” said Lou Erik Ambert, 31, a litigation paralegal to the Sun-Sentinel. “I feel so violated.”
But since Florida is an “at-will” employment state, companies “can fire for good reason, for bad reason, or for no reason at all, if the reason is not illegal,” said Allan Weitzman, a board certified attorney in labor and employment law at Prosakauer Rose LLP in Boca Raton to ABC News.
If your boss doesn’t like the colour of your shirt, that’s a legal firing reason, as is protesting by wearing it.
Although, as ABC points out, if the employees had been protesting working conditions, their protest would have been protected under federal law.
Under Ontario common law non-unionized workers can be terminated for wearing orange too, according to labour law expert David Doorey. The only difference is that the employer in Ontario would have to provide notice of the termination, he wrote in a blog post.
The exception would be if wearing orange were required for religious reasons, or if the colour was being worn as part of a trade union support activity.
Good thing I don't have a job, eh?
WFDS
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