thejvalentino

[thejvalentino]

[thejvalentino]

no idea where i was going with this but i abandoned it at the most disconcerting moment possible

[thejvalentino]

An incomplete list of things that employers commonly threaten that are 100% illegal in the United States

"We'll fire you if you tell others how much you're making" The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 specifically protects employees who discuss their own wages with each other (you can't reveal someone else's wages if you were given that information in the course of work, but you can always discuss your own or any that were revealed to you outside of work duties)

"If we can't fire you for [discussing wages/seeking reasonable accommodation/filing a discrimination complaint/etc], we'll just fire you for something else the next day." This is called pretextual termination, and it offers your employer almost no protection; if you are terminated shortly after taking a protected action such as wage discussion, complaints to regulatory agencies, or seeking a reasonable accommodation, you can force the burden onto your employer to prove that the termination wasn't retaliatory.

"Disparaging the company on social media is grounds for termination" Your right to discuss workplace conditions, compensation, and collective action carries over to online spaces, even public ones. If your employer says you aren't allowed to disparage the company online or discuss it at all, their social media policy is illegal. However, they can forbid releasing information that they're obligated to keep confidential such as personnel records, business plans, and customer information, so exercise care.

"If you unionize, we'll just shut this branch down and lay everyone off" Threatening to take action against a group that unionizes is illegal, full stop. If a company were to actually shut down a branch for unionizing, they would be fined very heavily by the NLRB and be opening themselves up to a class-action lawsuit by the former employees.

"We can have any rule we want, it's only illegal if we actually enforce it" Any workplace policy or rule that has a "chilling effect" on employees' willingness to exercise their rights is illegal, even if the employer never follows through on any of their threats.

"If you [protected action], we'll make sure you never work in this industry/city/etc again." Blacklisting of any kind is illegal in half the states in the US, and deliberately sabotaging someone's job search in retaliation for a protected action is illegal everywhere in the US.

"Step out of line and you can kiss your retirement fund/last paycheck goodbye." Your employer can never refuse to give you your paycheck, even if you've been fired. Nor can they keep money that you invested in a retirement savings account, and they can only claw back the money they invested in the retirement account under very specific circumstances.

"We'll deny that you ever worked here" not actually possible unless they haven't been paying their share of employment taxes or forwarding your withheld tax to the government (in which case they're guilty of far more serious crimes, and you might stand to gain something by turning them in to the IRS.) The records of your employment exist in state and federal tax data, and short of a heist that would put Oceans 11 to shame, there's nothing they can do about that.

[thejvalentino]

Female treecko hero thought process

Bonus:

[thejvalentino]

We've all gotten just a bit too comfortable being jerks to strangers on the internet I think

[thejvalentino]

oh so they’re just saying the quiet part out loud? Good to know they’re just out and open now

[thejvalentino]

hating furries is just a silencer on the gun that is hating on lgbt+ tbh

[thejvalentino]

[thejvalentino]

[thejvalentino]

do you ever watch something and think “this was written by a man”

[thejvalentino]

"I don't want to read this" is totally valid.

"This is disgusting to me" is totally valid.

"I don't want to read this because it is disgusting to me" is totally valid.

"I don't think anyone should be allowed to read or write this because it is disgusting to me" is authoritarian.

[thejvalentino]

[thejvalentino]

sorry since realizing my gender i have zero tolerance for the whole “man hating” angle of being queer i hate i hate it i hate you. stop. you are hurting people.

[thejvalentino]

Just a thought for the night, but remember in 2016 there were all these accounts that seemed really really telling you all the ways Hillary Clinton was some kind of demon woman, just the worst, and really Trump wouldn't be worse and maybe he'd even be better?

and then it turned out they got banned for being literally Russian agents and never came back because spoiler they were?

does it feel like that all over again? just a thought.

[thejvalentino]

people who let me wake up to this get a special place in heaven. firefly_fox how does it feel to hold my life in ur hands....

[thejvalentino]

I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

Switch to linux, it's free and it's good.

[thejvalentino]

When I see people sharing so much of their kids' lives, I think about that one time my child told a joke, I shared that joke with ONE FRIEND in a private conversation, and my child said "can you please ask me next time, before you tell people something about me?"

And, yes, I absolutely should. So I apologized, and now I ask.

"I love that video of you, can I show it to a friend?"

"Can I tell a friend about how clever you were just now?"

"Can I share this in the family group chat?"

"Can I show your art to grandma and grandpa?"

And it's not like my kids don't like when I share their jokes and puns and fun moments. They love it! But they want to have control over what I share with people. Even without their faces or their names. Even people we know and trust.

And they deserve to have that control.

My children are small so the examples are small. They wanted me to ask, so I ask. Just like being told to kiss my grandma's cheek when I was a kid was far from traumatizing, but I don't do that with my kids because it's a way to practice consent and become aware of bodily autonomy.

It gets both me and them in the habit of asking for consent and drawing boundaries and seeing the lines between their life and my life, their stories and my stories.