In May, Inc. magazine named Ramsey Solutions, the Franklin-based company founded by evangelical financial personality Dave Ramsey, one its Best Workplaces for 2020. The company proudly touted the designation on Twitter.
That was almost a year ago, though, and a lot has happened since then. Ramsey spent the better part of the year flaunting his disregard for COVID-19 precautions, even hosting a massive maskless Christmas party as COVID-19 cases and deaths were soaring. In January, the company reacted, er, poorly to Religion News Service's investigation into its internal policies and treatment of employees. Among the details reported in that story was the fact that the company fired a woman for being pregnant outside of marriage, but had not taken any similar action against Chris Hogan, a popular Ramsey Solutions personality who had extramarital affairs. Less than two months after that, Hogan announced he was leaving the company because "recently it's come to light that I've done some things personally that are not in line with Ramsey Solutions."
That brings us to this week, when The Tennessean reported that lawyers representing Ramsey Solutions argued in new court filings that, actually, the company hadn't fired the woman for being pregnant. They fired her for having premarital sex, they wrote, and they'd fired 12 other employees for the same reason.Â
In its own write-up of the news, Inc. reports that "under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, discriminating against an employee for being pregnant is illegal for companies with 15 or more employees. Whether a company can legally fire an employee for having premarital sex is more of a gray area, and has led to lawsuits against religious employers that terminated unmarried employees who became pregnant."
The story also includes this paragraph.Â
Ramsey Solutions was named a 2020 Inc. Best Workplaces honoree, having met objective criteria through an application and employee survey process. Ramsey has the right to manage its business in accordance with its values, and the court system will determine the merits of the lawsuit. Upon learning about the company's "righteous living" policy and how it is applied, we believe that it is incompatible with our standards of organizational excellence and have made the editorial decision to remove the company from our 2020 Best Workplaces list.
Better luck this year.Â
