Regardless of your position – CFO, Controller, operational staff, CSR, janitor -when you accept “employment at will” arrangement in a privately-held company, you inadvertently give up the majority of your rights granted to you by the US Constitution. Since the Bill of Rights is automatically presumed, it is not necessary to include freedom clauses into Employee Handbooks, Rules of Conduct and other such documents. Look through them again whenever you have a chance: they primarily describe what the company expects of you, not the other way around.
Closely-held companies are not democracies. They are owners’ kingdoms, absolute monarchies. And most of the time there is nothing you can do about it. Let us look at some of the Amendments.
1. Free Exercise of Beliefs. Having been always based in NYC precluded me from ever witnessing open discrimination of employees for their religious believes. At the same time on many occasions I’ve observed explicitly expressed irritation about people’s taking their PTO to celebrate religious holidays. Quite a few times I saw the candidates being rejected based on the unspoken possibility of their observance.
2. We do not have Freedom of Speech as employees. We try to keep our political, social and cultural opinions to ourselves if we know they contradict those of our bosses. Frequently we are not even given an opportunity to retort abusive, accusatory, or unfair verbiage directed at us or at our subordinates.
3. We cannot exercise Right to Assembly. I myself as a supervisor is pretty strict about people congregating for reasons not related to their jobs during work hours. At the same time I am not as obsessive about it as some business-owners who throw tantrums every time they see people talking.
4. The Protection from Unreasonable Search is violated time and again in the workplace. The business files, emails, etc. are rightfully belong to the company you work for, and if you are openly asked to follow established policies of information sharing, files locations and full disclosure, you should willingly comply. But many employers use System Administrators to secretly look through their employees’ emails, files, etc. They open doors with spare keys and look into draws containing personal affects. They use special programs to record IM communications, etc, etc.
5. Not a single right guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment (due process, double jeopardy, self-incrimination) is considered when you are judged, persecuted and punished by your boss. Fairness is laughed at in business environment. A lot of CEO’s, with whom I dealt over the years either as an employee or through business and social networking, considered my personal determination to be as fair as possible and judge people on their merits in all situations as one of my “strange” qualities.
One right we, as employees, can enjoy under “employment at will” arrangement is the very special freedom it guarantees you: just as your employer can fire you without warning, you can quit on a moment’s notice. That, of course, if you can afford to do so.
The Frustrated CFO 