Some of you may recall that I serve on the editorial advisory board of Workforce Magazine. I also pen a monthly column for the mag. Since we are approaching Valentine’s Day, I’m sharing this month’s timely column. Enjoy.
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| Love Has No Boundaries — Except at Work | |
Two years ago, we cancelled our Plain Dealer subscription. As working parents of two young kids, reading the paper took a back seat to, well, life in general. The fine folks at the Plain Dealer, however, do not appear to believe us. Each Sunday morning, we awaken to find a four-page “promotional” edition of the paper in the driveway. No amount of phone calls have stopped the annoyance of this weekly driveway spam.
Last Sunday, I awoke to six inches of snow. Perhaps it was because the paper was buried under the blanket of white, or because it didn’t register as a fact important enough to recall, but I did not give the four pages of promo-news a second thought as I pushed the snowblower down my drive. More accurately, I didn’t give it a second thought until I saw a few scraps of paper fly from the chute, followed quickly by the smell of smoke and the abrupt sound of the blades seizing.
“F***ing newspaper,” I yelled!
“What,” you are saying to yourselves, “does this story have to do with employee terminations?”
When you terminate an employee, you cannot act on impulse. When the snowblower jammed, my first impulse was to do everything possible to unjam it. The joy of my success, however, would have been severely tempered by a hospital trip to reattach my finger(s). The same holds true when you terminate an employee. Without exception, you cannot act out of anger or impulse. Your decisions must be well researched and deliberate. Review the personnel file. Talk to managers and supervisors. Read relevant policies. Research how similar employees have been treated in similar situations. And, if you have any doubt, call your employment lawyer. More often than not, impulse leads to lawsuits.
I’ll leave it to you to decide—between a lawsuit or lost finger—which is the more painful.
There is only one person that I chose to live with longer than my wife—Rob Schwartz, my college roommate. We shared a doom room, and then an apartment, for four years in Binghamton, NY. It’s no wonder that our world views are so similar. I cannot more highly recommend his newly launched blog, Dad Working. His mission:
There are tons of blogs about the challenges of working moms and I recognize the reality in their struggles, too. I’m hoping to fill the gap for those fathers who also strive and struggle with the expectations of home and work while presenting a new view of what it means to be one of two working parents.
Welcome to the wonderful world of blogging (or, as I call it, my addiction).
Here’s the rest of what I read this week:
Discrimination
Social Media & Workplace Technology
HR & Employee Relations
Wage & Hour
Labor Relations
Chris Rock once said, “You know what it means when somebody pays you minimum wage? … ‘Hey, if I could pay you less, I would.’”
If Ohio Senate Bill 25 becomes law, that minimum in Ohio will go up.
Yesterday, 10 Senators introduced S.B. 25 [pdf], which proposes comprehensive reform to Ohio’s state wage-and-hour laws.
If passed, it would:
All 10 of the sponsors of S.B. 25 are Democrats. The problem, though, is that the Ohio has 33 state senators, and the other 23 are all Republicans. Thus, this bill has little chance of advancing out of committee, let alone becoming law.
Nevertheless, there a class war waging in this country, with the minimum wage as its front line. Expect this issue to be front and center as we approach the next national election cycle in 2016.
I spent yesterday working from home, as Cleveland got socked with nearly a foot of snow and my kids had the day off from school.
While working from home, I came across an article from Crain’s New York Business, entitled, Porn and the snowbound workforce. The article argued that winter storms lead to increased software security violations, including those on company-owned computers that employees are using to work from home, including a spike in malware infections.
[I]ncreased levels of malware infections go almost hand-in-hand with increased traffic to porn sites. Adult-content platform Pornhub reported a 21% increase in traffic from New York City-based users during this week’s storm…. For randier New Yorkers who might have been home with work-provided laptops, the blizzard malware infections could cause more than just an uncomfortable chat with human resources.
Companies should want employees to have the flexibility to work from home during inclement weather. It’s certainly safer than having them traverse icy or snow-covered roads. Moreover, it enables you to capture some of the productivity you would otherwise lose from childrens’ snow days and other weather-related days off. Companies must, however, make it clear to employees that work computers are for work, and not for play, even if the employee is using the computer at home.
Consider the following Telecommuting Principles, from the Emory WorkLife Resource Center:
These types of policies cannot guarantee a malware-free IT infrastructure. They will, however, provide you some sense of security in knowing that your employees are aware of the issue, while at the same time providing you the ammunition you need to support action against a employee who misuses your computers.
Last Monday, I wrote about a jury verdict against an employer that refused to make accommodation for an employee who objected to the use of the company’s time-keeping hand scanner for religious reasons. In response, one reader commented:
Seems to me that the law should require some sort of reasonableness requirement on the plaintiff. There’s no reason we should have to accommodate every ridiculous whack-a-doodle demand…. “The Mark of the Beast”? Seriously??? We should not have to cater to such nutjobs, and it makes a mockery of our legal/political/economic system to have to do so.
Well, captain_quirk, this one’s for you.
Last week, the 6th Circuit, in Yeager v. FirstEnergy Generation Corp., held that an employer does not have to accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs if those religious beliefs conflict with a requirement of federal law.
When the plaintiff, Donald Yeager, turned 18, he disavowed his social security number. As a Fundamentalist Christian, he believed that being identified by any number, including the federally mandated social security number, was having the “Mark of the Beast.” (Amazingly, Yeager is not alone in this thinking.) FirstEnergy refused to hire Yeager because he would not provide his social security number. Yeager sued, and lost.
Every circuit to consider the issue has [held] that Title VII does not require an employer to reasonably accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs if such accommodation would violate a federal statute. Some courts have [held] that a statutory obligation is not an “employment requirement,” while others have held … that violating a federal statute would impose an “undue hardship.” These dual rationales arrive at the same, sensible conclusion: “[A]n employer is not liable under Title VII when accommodating an employee’s religious beliefs would require the employer to violate federal … law.”
The Internal Revenue Code requires employers such as FirstEnergy to collect and provide the social security numbers of their employees. In this case … FirstEnergy’s collection of Yeager’s social security number is a “requirement imposed by law” and therefore not an “employment requirement.”
Despite this highly sensible decision, I stand by my conclusion from last week’s discussion—much more often than not, requests for accommodations are not the demarcation on a battleground, but the call for a middle ground … unless the request asks you to violate a federal law, in which case all bets are off.
