FINALLY! A WHINY WOKE EMPLOYEE GOT FIRED FOR WHINY WOKENESS
Michael Lopez worked for a huge subdivision of an even bigger multinational entertainment corporation, the place that most of us imagine as a hotbed of woke virtue-signaling. Certainly, Lopez thought he was taking a snowflake’s stand about the Dobbs decision, only to find his employer slapping him down like a mosquito on the wall.
It’s just one person, but it’s another small sign that the corporate world’s love affair with its bullying woke employees is finally ending.
Lopez worked for Universal Music Enterprises (UME), which is a subsidiary of Universal Music Group (UMG). According to Wikipedia UMG is “a Dutch-American multinational music corporation. UMG’s corporate headquarters are located in Hilversum, Netherlands and its operational headquarters are located in Santa Monica, California.
The biggest music company in the world, it is one of the ‘Big Three’ record labels, along with Sony Music and Warner Music Group.” Lopez’s employer, UME, is UMG’s catalogue division, also headquartered in Santa Monica.
What all that information boils down to is this: Lopez works for an entertainment company that is presumptively going to lean left, because they all do, and his place of work is in Santa Monica, California, one of the hardest left cities in a hard-left county, in a hard-left state.
This should be a perfect paradise for woke views and snowflake behavior. And yet, as Lopez whines, when his exquisite woke sensitivities made it impossible for him to work after the Dobbs decision, his employer was not at all sympathetic but, instead, fired him.
Lopez identifies as a “queer brown person” who was “devastated by the news of the supreme court’s attack on abortion rights.” He’s also been suffering from the “flood of anti-queer and anti-trans legislation.” These psychic blows have made it “hard to process how company’s [sic] expect us to be productive while our rights are being stripped away.”
Every Friday, explains Lopez, he was responsible for processing the reports for upcoming releases, which he then put in an email with 275 recipients. But last Friday, after Dobbs, it was just too much for him, so he sent the following email to those 275 recipients:
“I didn’t do them today. I’m in mourning due to the attack on people with uteruses in the US. Federally guaranteed access to abortion is gone.
Vivendi and Universal Music Group must stop donating to anti-abortion, anti-queer and anti-trans politicians. Politicians like Marsha Blackburn, Ken Buck, Victoria Spartz, etc. Or expect more unproductive days.
Yours in fury,
—Michael Lopez”
Lopez was probably thinking of Disney’s and Nickelodeon’s excessive devotion to their LGBTQ+++’s employees’ politics and emotions. He boasts that, immediately after he sent the email, he received “several supportive emails from other co-workers and a manager calling to tell me to take the rest of the day off.”
Poor Lopez. He apparently was unaware that the corporate tide may be turning. For example, Netflix, after first bowing down to its woke employees, finally snapped and pushed back. That may explain why Lopez was so shocked by UME’s next step: it fired him for failing to do his job.
“Around 9:30-ish today, I got a surprise Zoom video chat with HR. I was being let go for (paraphrasing) ‘Not doing your job, disrupting the day of 275 people and poor judgement.’ I was told to log out and that a courier would be there to pick up my laptop from my apartment within the hour.”
This intrepid culture warrior, however, managed to fire off an email notifying the same recipients that he’d been fired, and pointing out the true horror of life in America:
“A brown queer person terminated during Pride month speaking in support of abortion rights. Seems like that’s exactly what America is all about right now.
Their actions today, their silence on Friday are indicative of their motivations. Profit at all costs. Solidarity, only if it’s profitable. And above all of that is maintaining the status quo and saying **** you to the working class.”
In other words, Lopez, a San Diego State U graduate, thought he was still in college, where students (with government backing) are writing the checks and the institution is happy to coddle them, especially because the students are parroting academia’s views.
Lopez hadn’t made the intellectual transition that would allow him to understand he was in the working world, where his employer was writing a check and wanted Lopez’s labor in exchange for that money, a concept Lopez found offensive.
It’s to be hoped that more companies recognize that the tide is turning against people like Lopez, who live on an emotional diet of anger and victimhood. They’re awful people to be around and lousy employees. But perhaps, if they get the message that the grown-up world has different rules, they’ll finally start to change.
Ps: Lopez posted all this on his LinkedIn page. Hopefully he’ll pay attention to this comment on his post:
“Michael Lopez unfortunately you tell us more about your motivations than your employer. YOU made queer and brown an issue, not them. Your political motivations became more important than what you were hired to do.
Like most business owners, your employer hired you to do a job, and then you refused to do it because your feelings were hurt. AFTER you broke your obligation, you were fired and then you decided you needed a platform to show you were a victim, when in reality you were the bully in this scenario.
I know your employer didn’t place an ad to hire a brown queer with left leaning politics, but instead hired someone with the talent to do a job. You obviously had the talent or they wouldn’t have hired you. It’s sad that you now call them the bad guys or oppressors and you the victim, but it doesn’t shock me because they is what is being taught in schools.
The only motivations I question in this scenario are yours, and I hope you actually get to run a business one day and you will have a different outlook on things. I value your opinion and would gladly debate you on any issue, but you don’t get paid to do that at work and neither does anyone else while working for their employer.” Michael May
Andrea Widburg is Deputy Editor of American Thinker