Federal court finds for worker fired by company after keeping gun in vehicle

By Chris Eger

A federal appeals court last week sided with a power company worker who had been terminated after a gun was found in his personal vehicle at work.
In 2016, long-time Ameren Illinois company employee Bryan Knox consented to a search of his vehicle in a company lot that yielded a firearm. Terminated under Ameren’s Workplace Violence policy, his union appealed the firing and an arbitrator determined that he had been wrongfully dismissed because of protections offered by state law for guns in personal vehicles. While a District Court overturned the arbitration results after Ameren went to court on the matter, a panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit said last Friday that the law was, in fact, on Knox’s side.
The 13-page opinion by U.S. Judge Michael Stephen Kanne for the unanimous panel said that external law such as the Illinois Concealed Carry Act trumps the bargaining agreement between Knox’s union — the IBEW — and Ameren, making the decision clear-cut when it came to labor law. Kanne, appointed to the federal bench in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan, however, maintained that the right to keep and bear arms was not expressly part of the arbitration.
“We stress that although the original dispute involved

Source: Guns.com