I can’t say that Alarm One’s workplace motivational technique of spanking (both male and female) employees who are late for meetings while other employees hoot is one I approve of, but Janet Orlando’s claim of emotional injury and unmoored damages is more than a little out of whack. (Pablo Lopez, “Workplace spanking leads to lawsuit”, Fresno Bee, Apr. 25 (hat-tip J.T.).
Posts Tagged ‘workplace’
Praising God for supervisor’s death
A Florida federal court has ruled that it’s not protected speech under religious discrimination law, according to Lou Michels at Suits in the Workplace (Apr. 5; West v. Shands Hospital & Clinics, Inc., N.D. Fla.) From Michels’s summary of the case:
The plaintiff, who had many difficulties with her supervisor, began telling her coworkers that the supervisor’s stroke was a sign of God’s “wrath” and an indication of Divine judgment. When the supervisor died, the employee noted that God’s vengeance was served and “victory is mine” to her coworkers. Her activities caused a major disruption in the office, with some shocked employees unable to work as a result of the Plaintiff’s celebration. The plaintiff was subsequently terminated for her conduct, and sued the hospital for race and religious discrimination under Title VII.
TV anchor claims right to host evangelical show on side
Frank Turner, a 5 p.m. anchor for WXYZ-TV in Detroit, has filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against his employer “for refusing him permission to host an evangelical radio program in his spare time,” thus violating his right to religious accommodation. The station disagrees:
Station officials, while not wanting to comment on Turner’s case directly, say they have exclusive contracts with their on-air talent and never allow anchors or others to work on competing broadcast outlets.
“We spend millions of dollars a year promoting our on-air talent and we want to have them working exclusively for Channel 7,” said Grace Gilchrist, the station’s vice president and general manager.
(Paul Egan, “TV anchor’s choice: God or Ch. 7 job”, Detroit News, Mar. 31)(via Romenesko).
Math test improper for police applicants
Republicans and Democrats come and go in the U.S. Department of Justice, but “disparate-impact” theory remains alive and well, as in the case of a new consent decree summarized by a correspondent of NRO’s John Derbyshire (Apr. 4):
“In February, the Justice Department sent a letter to Virginia Beach, concluding that the Beach Police Department has ‘engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination’ against black and Hispanics applicants.
“The only evidence cited were results of a math exam given to all police recruits. It showed a wide gap between the passing rates for white applicants and the passing rates for black and Hispanics.
“About 85 percent of white applicants passed the math test from 2002 to mid-2005, compared with 59 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics.”
More details from the article in question (Duane Bourne, “Virginia Beach agrees to change the way it scores police math exams”, The Virginian-Pilot, Apr. 3):
The Justice Department questioned whether math is relevant to the daily duties of a police officer. The city agreed to eliminate the 70 percent cutoff score for the math part of the test….
At least one city official, Councilwoman Reba McClanan, said she does not agree with the settlement.
“One of the things that’s insulting about it is they’re telling us we don’t have a right to insist on certain standards,” McClanan said. “My feeling was we should hang in there. We want fairness and we want as many minorities working for our departments as possible, but we also want them to meet certain standards.”
…
The city will also pay up to $160,000 to applicants who flunked the old standards.
P.S. At Workplace ProfBlog, Paul Secunda spells out something left implicit in the above summary: the Justice Department’s actions are a fairly straightforward application of the current state of “disparate-impact” law; if you see nothing amiss with the present state of that branch of the law, you may see nothing amiss with the outcome (Apr. 10).
Nurse Cullen’s references, VI
The notorious killer nurse is back in the news, and Philip K. Howard recalls the background of his crimes:
During his 16-year nursing career, Cullen was able to move from one hospital to another – to 10 medical facilities in all – because fear of litigation prevented those hospitals from giving him a bad reference. …
Even the Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees the state nursing board and had been warned about Cullen’s penchant for diverting medications, could not comment on his reputation. “Legally, we can’t speak about any information we receive that doesn’t result in disciplinary action,” a spokesman said….
America’s lawsuit culture has bred all kinds of bizarre changes to our society – warning labels on coffee cups, and doctors squandering billions in defensive medicine, to name just two. But the inability to be honest about how you feel about other people is one of the most destructive. Making judgments about people is the currency of a social interaction in a free society. Who tries hard? Who has good judgment? Who is a pleasure to deal with? And who acts in a way that makes your skin crawl?
(“When fear is deadly”, New York Sun, Mar. 14, reprinted at Common Good site). Earlier on Cullen: Aug. 10, 2005, Mar. 30, 2004, etc.
Tactical use of workplace lawsuits
Don’t cooperate with us on one issue, and we’ll arrange for you to get sued on other issues:
More often, unions undertake confrontational campaigns to squeeze employers to agree to card checks [i.e., recognizing the union as sole bargaining representative of workers on the basis of majority sign-up, rather than a representation election]. To pressure Cintas, the giant uniform and laundry company, Unite Here has encouraged workers to bring lawsuits alleging pay violations and racial and sexual discrimination. Cintas has not given in, insisting that secret-ballot elections are fairer.
(Steven Greenhouse, “Employers Sharply Criticize Shift in Unionizing Method to Cards From Elections”, New York Times, Mar. 11).
Help wanted (Calif. shakedown practice)?
Three years ago California’s notorious Trevor Law Group was found to be mass-mailing demand letters to small businesses alleging violations of the state’s ultra-liberal s. 17200 unfair business practices act, then settling the complaints for cash. A major furor ensued, and the state bar and Attorney General Bill Lockyer made gestures toward reforming the law to prevent law firms from running “shakedown” practices. But did it work? Mike Cernovich notices that a law firm has placed an employment ad on Craigslist seeking “additional counsel” to handle an “expanding workload”. What kind of workload? Well, it’s “primarily in the practice of wage and hour law inclusive of class actions … almost all [of our] cases are settled and are rarely tried.”
That business about settling rather than trying “almost all cases” got Cernovich’s suspicions up, and then he “saw something that made my jaw drop:”
In assessing the nature of the work and return on time spent it is helpful to keep in mind that the burden of proof is always on the employer to establish that he has paid the correct wages. The law requires that the employer keep accurate and timely maintained records that show hours worked and amounts paid. Failure to maintain such records is almost always at the heart of the case ….
Furthermore the employer will be liable for our legal fees if he is unable to defense the case. These two elements [the inability to prove us wrong and threat of attorneys fees] provide our clients with extraordinary leverage to resolve the matter.
Cernovich reads this as amounting to: “we sue employers knowing that it’s unlikely they’ll be able to produce records that will prove us wrong. … In other words, let’s just sue someone, hope he can’t produce any employment records to contradict us, threaten him with attorneys fees, and then settle the case post haste.” Or is he being too suspicious? (Mar. 8). (Updated/corrected shortly after posting to fix a mistake on my part about who placed the Craigslist ad; also retitled next morning.)
More on Trevor Law Group here and here. More on wage and hour law: Mar. 10, Jan. 9 and links from there.
Arise, ye prisoners of high-paid brokerage jobs
The overtime-classification wars have reached Wall Street, with the result that $400,000-a-year stockbrokers are claiming with a straight face that they’re really hourly employees, contends Littler Mendelson’s Allan G. King:
In a spate of class action lawsuits against Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Prudential and other brokerages, filed principally in New York, securities brokers — who earned billions in commissions annually — now claim they were just hourly “wage earners,” who were misclassified by their employers to thwart the Fair Labor Standards Act and the California Labor Code.
Could we please, please get Congress to revisit the antediluvian FLSA and start preparing to repeal parts of it that make no sense today, or never made sense in the first place? (cross-posted from Point of Law).
Why they aren’t running the cartoons
The Boston Phoenix (“World of Pain”, Feb. 9) tells readers that “frankly, the primary reason” it isn’t going to run the Danish Muhammed cartoons:
Out of fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. …Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year publishing history.
Somewhere there’s probably an issue of vicarious/employer liability lurking in here — if printing the cartoons did lead to violence, the Phoenix’s owners might well end up having to pay. But of course the venerable alt-weekly’s stance is practically a profile in courage compared with that of editors, publishers, governments and university officials in many other places, including South Africa (bans publication of images), Sweden (reported to have shut down website carrying them), Canada’s Prince Edward Island (university confiscates student newspaper, edict forbids weblog comments) and so on (Michelle Malkin roundup, Feb. 9). Commentaries worth reading: Krauthammer, Kinsley, and, from a different perspective, a commenter at Andrew Sullivan’s. (More on the cartoons here and here.)
Federal judge fines EEOC $1m for frivolous lawsuit
“The U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission must pay more than $1 million to a Pasadena law firm that it sued unsuccessfully last year for sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination, a federal judge has ruled. U.S. District Judge Dickran Tevrizian…. found that the EEOC filed a ‘frivolous’ lawsuit against Robert L. Reeves & Associates, which practices immigration law.” (AP/San Diego Union-Tribune, Jan. 25). There’s a discussion at WorkplaceProfBlog (Jan. 26).