You Should Be Able to Pick Your Boss

Or Coach

Last week, new Jaguars Head Coach Urban Meyer announced the hiring Chris Doyle as the team’s strength coach—and then a day later accepted Doyle’s resignation because Doyle “did not want to be a distraction.” Of course, what was so “distracting” was that Doyle had been pushed out of is last job, at the University of Iowa, because he was accused of racism and bullying by the players he was coaching.

When people questioned the wisdom of hiring someone like that, Meyer’s defense was almost comical: “I vet everyone on our staff, and like I said the relationship goes back close to 20 years and a lot of hard questions asked, a lot of vetting with all our staff… We did a very good job vetting that one.” In other words, Meyer is happy with how the vetting went because he’s the one who did it, and he knows he did a great job.

As dumb as it sounds—and looks, now that Meyer immediately backtracked and accepted Doyle’s resignation—this is basically the way all workplace investigations go. If someone is accused of being abusive at work, then some Official Vetter will come in. It could be the HR department, a supervisor, or even an independent outside firm; as long as it’s someone with an official sounding title who will Look Into It and Vet the Accusation. But the Meyer/Doyle situation shows how bad this system is.

First of all, Meyer is not an expert on judging racism. He’s a white guy who works in an industry known for racially skewed hiring practices. He also seems like a notably bad judge of character. Why on earth would any player, of any race, trust his judgment of the situation?

But I don’t mean to pick on Meyer. Meyer does seem like a pretty shitty guy (“successful college football coach” being a position almost exclusively occupied by horrible people), but he IS a good football coach. He keeps getting hired because he is good at coaching football. THAT is his area of expertise. It would be nice if, in addition to his coaching skills, he were also an expert on race relations, but that doesn’t seem realistic. We shouldn’t expect him to have that skill.

And yet this happens all the time with Official Vetters. We expect them to be experts in things like workplace behavior, sexual harassment, and racial sensitivity because that’s what they’re tasked with investigating. But they’re not hired for their expertise in those fields—typically, Official Vetters are hired to protect the employers from legal liability. They are hired so that, if anything goes wrong down the line, someone can still say, “We did a very good job vetting that one.”

The other issue is that even if the Official Vetter does conduct a thorough investigation, it is easy for them to miss abusive behavior because abusive bosses are often selective about their targets. Meyer pointed out that his relationship with Doyle goes back 20 years—and I’m sure Doyle has never been racist or abusive TO MEYER. But that’s not indicative of how he behaves when the Official Vetter isn’t looking.

In all of the MeToo reporting, a recurring theme was coworkers who were SHOCKED by the behavior of known predators—“All I can say is he was nothing but nice TO ME.” Well, sure. Predators are often excessively nice, often to the point of sycophancy, to those in power precisely BECAUSE it enables them to get away with abuse directed at those who without power. Doyle, as a college football coach for two decades, was working with people who were especially vulnerable. They were unpaid students, just out of high school, whose playing time, scholarships, and future careers depended on impressing the coach. It is not surprising that it took so long for an Official Vetter to get them to badmouth him.

The obvious solution is simply to empower all workers to pick their bosses, including football players. The people best positioned to see whether or not a coach is abusive are the players who play for him. Giving them the ability to reprimand or remove their boss would balance out the power disparity and create a fairer and more equitable work environment for everyone.

This type of arrangement is so rare under capitalism that people instinctively recoil at it. How can workers choose their own boss? Wouldn’t it be chaos? This is because the popular image of a “boss” is, if not quite a Chris Doyle-type, at least a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk-type. We deify a boss as a brilliant visionary whose workers are mindless cogs necessary to fulfill his vision. They may occasionally abuse their employees, and that’s unfortunate, but they still need absolute power because otherwise nothing would get done.

But this is nonsense. The players are the ones on the field, and they want to win. Workers want to do good work. The good ideas that do emerge from the massive corporate entities we identify with their CEOs are not the whims of an individual, but the result of constant collaboration. Sometimes a “boss” is necessary—you need people to delegate, to set deadlines, to adjudicate disagreements, etc. You need a coach to call the plays. But there’s no reason that person should not be accountable to their fellow workers. Giving them absolute power over their underlings is just asking for the kind of abuse Doyle is accused of, no matter how much vetting you do.