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A
response to Marc Brodsky... PROTESTS
FORCE PHYSICS TODAY TO REVEAL ITS
UNSOUND CASE For
many months after Physics Today
fired Jeff Schmidt over his book Disciplined Minds, the magazine
refused to respond to, or even acknowledge, the many letters of protest it
was receiving. Then, in August 2001,
as pressure mounted, Marc Brodsky, head of the American Institute of Physics,
which publishes Physics Today,
mentioned to some concerned physicists that “AIP may be forced to issue a
public statement.” A week later, the
American Institute of Physics finally broke its silence. Some
people had given Physics Today the
benefit of the doubt, figuring that there must be some unstated compelling
reason why Jeff deserved to be fired.
Brodsky’s statement should provide an assurance that no such reason
exists. Moreover,
a close look at Brodsky’s statement points to the real reasons for Jeff’s
dismissal — namely, the critical nature of his book and his history of
workplace activism. Far from
justifying AIP’s actions, Brodsky’s statement verifies in many ways that the Institute’s
behavior in this case has been unacceptably out of line with the values and
expectations of the community that it is supposed to serve and represent to
the world: 1. Brodsky claims that he fired Jeff on the
sole basis of the opening lines of Disciplined Minds, in which Jeff
dramatizes the fact that he wrote the book in part at the office. But Brodsky knows that AIP employees
engage in a wide variety of spare-time activity at work — chatting with
coworkers, writing personal e-mail, making personal phone calls, surfing the
Web and so on — and he has never punished anyone for that, or even
discouraged it. Yet he says he fired
Jeff for “pursuing activities beyond what he was supposed to be doing on work
time,” or, if not actually that, then at least “asserting that he did.” Jeff received much praise for his work at Physics
Today, from his supervisors, from the authors of the articles he edited
and from members of the physics community.
What made his workplace activities beyond his assignments grounds for
firing, if not the critical nature of those activities? 2. Brodsky claims that Jeff’s “termination
had nothing to do with the subject matter” of his book. But then he approvingly quotes the
National Labor Relations Board’s explanation that it is an assessment of the
book as a whole — a view of “the nature of the work involved in this matter”
— that allows AIP to read the book’s introduction in a way that justifies
firing Jeff. 3. Brodsky’s emphasis on his legal right to
fire Jeff misses the point. “No
agency has found that AIP violated any law,” boasts Brodsky. But the hundreds of physicists and others
who are speaking out in this case aren’t saying that Jeff’s dismissal was
illegal, but rather that it violated the physics community’s norms of
tolerance for differing viewpoints, norms that are essential for the
community’s functioning and credibility. Brodsky
cites the National Labor Relations Board as the authority in this case. However, the NLRB’s sole mission is to
determine whether there has been a violation of the National Labor Relations
Act of 1934, which made employee organizing a legally protected activity but
did not protect book writing. The
NLRB is not the appropriate body to determine what is right or wrong for the
physics community, nor is any other government agency or court. 4. It’s surprising that Brodsky would even
mention the NLRB, because, as he himself must know, the agency’s
investigation found Physics Today
to be a repressive and vengeful employer.
Brodsky hides this fact by quoting very selectively from the NLRB’s
findings, focusing on employer rights.
He does not quote the findings most relevant to the concerns of the
physics community and others who value free expression. The findings were reported by NLRB General
Counsel Arthur F. Rosenfeld — a former U.S. Chamber of Commerce lawyer
appointed by George W. Bush and no friend of workplace organizers and
activists. According to Rosenfeld... “The
evidence adduced during the Regional Office investigation established a prima
facie case that Charging Party Jeff Schmidt was discharged for engaging in
protected concerted activities. Thus,
the evidence indicated that Jeff Schmidt engaged in extensive protected
activity for over a decade, that the Employer had knowledge that Schmidt was
engaged in such activity, and that the Employer bore animus towards Schmidt
for engaging in such activity.” The
“protected activity” here is the workplace organizing that Jeff had been
doing. Rosenfeld
also took into account what he called Physics
Today’s “threats of discipline and other retaliatory conduct in order to
discourage employees from discussing working conditions with each other and
informing the Employer of their collective concerns.” And he noted that such behavior “is conduct
violative of the National Labor Relations Act.” Nevertheless,
a private corporation in the United States has the legal right to fire an
employee for writing a book it doesn’t like.
So the NLRB concluded that while Physics
Today may very well have engaged in numerous illegal repressive activities,
firing Jeff over the book could not be counted as one of them. With Jeff’s firing excluded from the case,
the NLRB decided, as a matter of prosecutorial discretion, not to take action
on the rest of the case. (The NLRB is
not required, and does not have the resources, to prosecute all illegal
activity.) Thus Physics Today escaped prosecution, but not, as Brodsky implies,
because of its exemplary or even legal behavior. A high standard indeed for an organization representing the
physics community! Jeff’s
book is critical of management and critical of the political subordination of
working scientists and other salaried professionals. By firing Jeff, Marc Brodsky, Physics
Today and the American Institute of Physics, as well as the American
Physical Society and the other organizations that govern AIP, have made it
clear that they are more interested in enforcing that subordination than in
living up to the physics community’s norms of free expression. AIP’s
statement is weak and legalistic, and confirms the worst fears of Jeff’s many
supporters. We ask, more resolutely
than ever, that Physics Today do
the right thing and give Jeff his job back. Talat
Rahman Fellow
of the American Physical Society University
Distinguished Professor Department
of Physics Kansas
State University Manhattan,
Kansas George
F. Reiter Professor
of Physics University
of Houston Houston,
Texas Michael
A. Lee Professor
of Physics Kent
State University Kent,
Ohio Denis
G. Rancourt Professor
of Physics University
of Ottawa Ottawa,
Ontario, Canada 14
January 2002 ------------------------- |
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