The chief executive of a Michigan bank has lost her job after facing backlash for a social media photo of her family in sweatshirts that read “Lake America,” referencing Donald Trump’s relabeling of Lake Ontario.
Jane Smith from Family First Credit Union recently went viral after sharing the photo of her and three relatives wearing navy blue crewnecks with the words “Lake America” scrawled in white. The picture was snapped as her family left on September 11 for a 10-day trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia, but Smith says the sweatshirts were edited onto their bodies using AI.
“We weren’t trying to make a political statement,” Smith told Michigan outlet WJRT. “However, we were kind of poking fun at the fact that one of the Great Lakes’ names were getting changed.”
Family First Credit Union announced Wednesday that Smith was no longer with the company and that Jason Acosta, the chief operations officer, would serve as interim CEO.
Then you should be fighting against at-will employment. That’s really where this comes from, the ability to fire people for any reason or no reason at all.
If we had even rudimentary worker protections, that wouldn’t really be much if a concern. You might still get let go, if your conduct is bad enough, but you’d have time to not just suddenly be unemployed and scrambling. But it’s a lot less likely to get to that position when employer over-reach is less of a thing to begin with.
Meanwhile our companies and oligarchs think they own us, cradle to grave, and they aren’t that far off, so no wonder they act like that’s the truth.
Absolutely, I’ve been for this my entire adult life. Unfortunately I’ve only seen workers rights slide backwards