Can employees dictate what products and services the employer provide?

An employee's duty is to undertake their role as laid out in their job description. When they sign on, they agree to this and become a servant of their employer.

It, therefore, surprises me that a Canadian cinema has cancelled the screening of a new movie, The Rise of Jordan Peterson.

The cancellation, according to the article, was prompted by a complaint by "'one or more' staff". The article also suggests that the complainants had probably not watched the film and so the complaints were levelled without fully appraising what the film contained. It is not clear why the employees felt that the movie should be banned although the film's title itself may have been sufficient to raise the employee's ire.

This seems another dangerous precedent and raises a number of questions:

• Can the beliefs of "one or more" employees dictate what the cinema can or cannot show?
• Why do the employees hold so much power?
• If the film was so controversial, why did the cinema agree to show it in the first place?
• If an employee does not like the products or services the employer provides, do they have the right to deprive others of using those products?
• If the Cinema had not backed down, would the employees have resigned as a real mark of their abhorrence at the film?

Those who wish to view the film could go to another cinema, assuming the ban does not extend to other venues or wait for it to be shown through another channel. Either way, this cancellation is another example of shutting down free speech with the possibility that people do not have the option to see the film and decide for themselves the merits of the content.