In all my years around offsite construction factories—production lines, front offices, sales teams, and boardrooms—I can’t remember a time when two factory owners reached out within the same week asking essentially the same question:
“What do I do now?”
The first email came from a factory owner in Colorado. One of his production line workers called in sick. That, by itself, is nothing new. People get sick. Or at least, they say they do.
What made this one different was that instead of staying home, the employee attended a very aggressive social protest. No specific cause was mentioned. No political party named. But the worker posted videos of the protest on TikTok, and in more than one clip, he mentioned where he worked.
The next day, he showed up for his shift—healthy enough now—and spent much of the day talking to coworkers, trying to get them “fired up” and encouraging them to join him.
The owner wasn’t upset about the protest itself. In fact, he acknowledged the employee’s right to free speech. What worried him was something more practical and a lot more uncomfortable: customers, prospects, or community members seeing those videos, hearing the factory’s name, and deciding they didn’t want to be associated with any of it.
Three days later, another email landed in my inbox.
This time it was a Massachusetts factory owner. Different role, same tension. The employee was an accounts payable assistant—office staff, not production. She also took a sick day to attend a protest. She didn’t just come back energized; she came back confrontational. In front of the rest of the office staff, she asked the owner point-blank whether he supported or opposed what she had protested.
It wasn’t a conversation. It was a challenge.
Now the owner was standing there, caught completely off guard, realizing that whatever he said—or didn’t say—was going to ripple through his office for weeks.
Both owners asked me essentially the same thing:
“Can I fire them?”
And that’s where things get uncomfortable for someone like me, who has spent a career talking confidently about factories, systems, management, and people.
I told them the same thing.
“I’ve never been in your position. Proceed cautiously. And talk to an HR attorney.”
That answer probably felt unsatisfying. It felt that way to me when I typed it. But this is one of those moments where confidence without legal grounding can do real damage.
Here’s the part that’s genuinely confusing—and I don’t say that lightly.
We’re not talking about workers refusing to do their jobs. We’re not talking about sabotage, theft, or harassment. We’re talking about employees who used sick time—questionably—to participate in something personal and political, then brought it directly into the workplace in a way that made owners nervous about culture, productivity, and reputation.
Free speech is real. So is the right to run a business without internal disruption.
Somewhere in between is a very thin line that most factory owners were never trained to walk.
What complicates this further is visibility. Twenty years ago, none of this would have mattered. An employee could have gone to a protest, come back to work, and no one outside the building would have known. Today, a 30-second TikTok clip can connect a privately held factory to a cause it never chose to be associated with.
That’s not a political statement. It’s a business reality.
The other uncomfortable truth is that both of these situations spread faster inside the company than outside. In Colorado, one employee tried to recruit others on the production line. In Massachusetts, one question put an entire office on edge.
Owners aren’t just worried about losing customers. They’re worried about losing control of the workplace itself.
I don’t think either owner wants to be the “speech police.” They just want to build components and wall panels, meet schedules, pay people fairly, and keep the peace.
But this is new ground for a lot of owners. And pretending it isn’t would be a mistake.
If there’s a takeaway here—other than “call an HR attorney before you do anything rash”—it’s this: factories are no longer insulated environments. Culture doesn’t stop at the parking lot. Social media doesn’t respect job titles. And a sick day isn’t always just a sick day anymore.
I don’t have a clean answer. I wish I did.
What I do know is that firing first and asking questions later is a bad strategy in today’s world. So is ignoring behavior that disrupts your business because you’re afraid of stepping on a landmine.
Owners are being forced into roles they never signed up for—part employer, part referee, part risk manager.
And honestly?
That’s the part that should make all of us pause.
Gary Fleisher—known throughout the industry as The Modcoach—has been immersed in offsite and modular construction for over three decades. Beyond writing, he advises companies across the offsite ecosystem, offering practical marketing insight and strategic guidance grounded in real-world factory, builder, and market experience.
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