Your Boss Should Not Be Able to Kick You
A truly radical proposal
Sometimes, when I make suggestions like “workers should choose their own boss,” the reaction I get is not so much pushback as mystification—it sounds good in theory, but it’s something that’s just hard for people to picture. How would it even work? Is every department going to have elections for its leader? It is so anathema to the hierarchical workplace culture, where a boss’ power over his employee is assumed to be very broad, that it can be hard to imagine an alternative. I myself find it hard to envision.
So let’s start with a real world example: Urban Meyer was fired last week by the Jacksonville Jaguars, after it was reported that he kicked the team’s placekicker, Josh Lambo, during a warmup back in the preseason. Meyer denies the allegations, and really the firing was a long time coming—it has honestly felt imminent ever since Meyer was first hired back in January. Since then he tried to hire a racist strength coach, gave a roster invite to a clearly undeserving Tim Tebow because they were old buddies, declined to fly back to Florida with the team and then lied about it, picked fights with his own assistants, and oh by the way lead the Jaguars to a 2-11 record, which is last in the NFL. Lambo’s allegations were just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
But because the hammer fell so swiftly after this report, it might be easy to gloss over the details. Lambo alleges that, while he was stretching, Meyer came over and said, “Hey dipshit, make your fucking kicks,” (Lambo had missed three field goals in recent preseason games) and then kicked him in his kicking leg. Lambo described the kick as roughly halfway between a full-strength kick and a “love tap,” and says his reaction was to yell, “Don’t you ever fucking kick me again!” at which point Meyer supposedly responded saying, “I'm the head ball coach, I’ll kick you whenever the fuck I want.” Later that day, Lambo told his agent, who then told the Jaguars legal counsel, who now say they “acknowledged and responded immediately to the query” (whatever the fuck that means)—while Lambo says he never spoke to anyone from the legal team.
It’s worth acknowledging that we probably shouldn’t take all these details at face value. It’s not that there’s any reason to doubt Lambo specifically, but he’s talking about something that happened over three months ago, and he has reason to be bitter with Meyer and the Jaguars, who cut him before the season started. It’s unlikely that he’s making this up completely—the Jaguars confirmed they talked to the agent at the time, and it probably wouldn’t be the occasion for Meyer’s firing if it were wholly unfounded—but he may be misremembering the specific details of the incident. So we shouldn’t get too caught up in those details.
Instead, let’s focus on what we know for sure: There was some hostile incident between a fringe player and his coach. The player reported the incident to his agent. The fact that Lambo felt more comfortable going to his agent than anyone associated with the team itself is not really surprising—his agent is the only one unequivocally on his side. As we’ve seen time and again, when abuses are reported to superiors, or to HR, or to anyone within the structure of the team, they are almost always buried.
Of course, most people don’t have agents; more importantly, the agent doesn’t seem to have accomplished much. He told the team’s counsel—not exactly the people you go to for discipline. It was only later, when the story became another in a long line of embarrassing stories about the Jaguars coach, that it was used to justify firing him. The Jaguars owner, Shad Khan, had already admitted losing trust in Meyer based on other things. This is why people are right to say things like, “If the Jaguars were winning, nobody would care about this.” There is enough ambiguity here that a denial or a sham “internal investigation” could easily deflect from any negative attention an ex-kicker could bring.
When I say something like, “You should be able to pick your own boss,” what I mean in practice is that, “If your boss kicks you, there needs to be a mechanism for punishing him that is independent of the normal work hierarchy.” Because kicking a player is wrong—or maybe you don’t think that. Maybe you think Lambo needs to toughen up and kicking a player is fine in some situations. I’m not even trying to convince you otherwise. I’m merely saying that the rightness or wrongness of kicking your employee should not be dependent on the whims of your boss’ boss. Maybe your boss’ boss thinks your easier to replace than your boss, in which case they’ll just cut you from the team and find a new kicker. Maybe your boss’ boss is sick of your boss, in which case they’ll use it as an excuse to fire him instead. But neither situation is really about justice for getting kicked.