Docucopies Champions Freedom of Speech While Valuing and Protecting the Comfort of Their Team Members

Here at Docucopies we believe strongly in freedom of speech as established and implied by the First Amendment. It is the most important of all our amendments, as it establishes the right to speak up against the government, and the right to freedom of the press, essentially making it an invulnerable tool for political and social change. Without the First Amendment, many of the ones that followed would not have been. (This blog’s author, by the way, carries a B.A. in Journalism and is an avid defender of the Constitution.)

But freedom of the press is a double-edged sword. Inevitably, every printer must make tough choices and set policies about what they will and will not print. Sometimes these choices are based on the beliefs and views of the company’s owners. Other times they are based on the comfort and dignity of the employees who must work on the jobs.

Docucopies has to make choices, too. I remember getting a phone call from a man who wanted to print up handbooks for new members of the KKK. Obviously I rejected his job, probably more politely than I should have. In this case, it was based on both a fundamental disdain for their hateful views (we do not print hate speech) and the comfort of our employees.

From time to time, people also send us racy material, including sexual and/or pornographic material, and expect us to print them. While we as a company make no official judgment on the role these sorts of things play in society, we do have a strict policy to not print them. This is both for the comfort of our team members and the integrity of our business. From a purely legal standpoint, we could be sued by our employees for sexual harassment should we make them work on these sorts of things. (Forcing someone to view sexually offensive material as part of their job is a form of sexual harassment, something we, like all workplaces, have a very strict code on.) But more so, we are a conscious and empathic company who genuinely cares about the comfort and dignity of our employees, whether they’re on the clock or not.

The funny thing is when people assume because of the First Amendment that we are obligated to print whatever they send us. This is simply ludicrous. The First Amendment, among other laws, guarantees our right to deny service. The free market dictates it as well; if one printer will not work with a customer, there’s always another who will.

Because of our output volume, not every single file is inspected for offensive material. And inevitably, as we put out millions of copies a month, some of it might occasionally slip through without our knowledge. So in some cases customers who have had things printed with us before suddenly find that we will not print a new job. This is not reflective of a sudden change in policy. More than likely it’s because some element of the job required taking a closer look at the files, at which point offensive material was discovered. In these cases, we politely inform the customers that we will not print their job.

Obviously this can cause a backlash. Following a recent incident, dozens of posts were made on blogs and forums relating to a certain customer’s niche industry. Random and anonymous people hurled slanderous insults and accusations about our company, creating quite a fervor. Fortunately, a good chunk of these people also defended Docucopies and our policy to not print offensive material. But others clearly had a misconstrued understanding of our policy and incorrectly linked our rejection of said-job to the social and political views of our company and/or our owners, which is just silly. In almost all cases, rejection is for the comfort of our employees and is not intended to be a form of censorship.

After a couple weeks of consideration, we decided to write this blog post in response to the back-and-forth banter coursing through the forums in question.

So, to clarify where we stand:

Docucopies DOES NOT discriminate against customers or their orders on the basis of political affiliation, religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, age, physical disability, or any other factors pertaining to the customers’ personal views, dispositions, or lifestyles or such views as expressed in their files.

Docucopies DOES discriminate against orders which are overtly sexual or pornographic in nature, constitute hate speech, contain illegal material, infringe on copyrights, or any other orders which we reasonably believe might make ANY team member feel uncomfortable, undignified or discriminated against.

Fortunately our team members are all fairly reasonable, moderate people, so it’s rare that this sort of thing arises. But when it does, we feel it’s better to address the issue than to ignore it, as we value quality customer service.

We hope this settles our position on this issue, and we look forward to continuing to serve our customers!