Some day Oregon may take a similar step to keep employers out of your car

By Hasso Hering

Last week the Florida legislature passed what some news reports called a "take your guns to work" bill. The description is wrong. The legislation should be called the "keep your employer out of your car" bill. Or the "whatever legal stuff you keep in your vehicle is nobody's business" bill.

In 2002, Weyerhaeuser fired about a dozen workers from a mill in Valliant, Okla., after dogs had been brought in and sniffed out the fact that the workers had firearms in their vehicles in the parking lot. The guns were a violation of company policy. One of the workers had worked at the plant for 23 years. Some weeks before, he had shot a dying cow on his ranch, then tossed his empty rifle behind the seat in his truck and forgot about it.

The Valliant episode caused an uproar Oklahoma. In response , the legislature in 2004 passed a law forbidding companies to fire workers for such an abridgement of their rights. The law has been held up as unconstitutional since then, but a few other states have passed similar statutes, and now Florida has done the same.

If it takes effect, the Florida law will prohibit business owners from banning guns kept locked in motor vehicles in their parking lots. Opponents including the Florida Chamber of Commerce strongly opposed the bill on the grounds that it violated the private property rights of employers. They complained that it abridges the right of business owners to determine what happens on their property.

Actually, the bill doesn't affect what happens anywhere, except that workers can't be fired for keeping something in their rigs that they are legally and constitutionally entitled to have, and which constitutes no hazard as long as it remains locked up.

As citizens, workers have rights too, including the right to be left alone in their private possessions as long as they are not against the law.

Potential workplace violence is always a worry. But banning guns from inside locked vehicles in the parking lot has no likely effect on that issue one way or another, since if someone had a mind to cause trouble, guns can just as easily be kept in vehicles parked on the street where the corporation's reach does not extend.

Oregon is not one of the states where a Florida-type statute has been passed. This is an omission that the legislature ought to repair.

It will never do so under its present leadership, but the people may ask for such a law the next time the political tide turns, if it ever does turn again.