You just found out you hired a sex offender. Now what?

A reader sent me the following question.

I worked for a grocery store. Can a child molester be employed by the grocery store? I reported it to the manager, and showed proof and nothing was done about it.

There’s a lot going on here. What does the law require an employer to do (if anything) under these circumstances? And what should an employer do when it discovers it is employing a sex offender?

The 11th nominee for the “worst employer of 2019” is … the 💩y supervisor

From the legaladvice subreddit:

So background, I have IBS and sometimes have to go the bathroom multiple times per work day. My supervisor doesn’t believe I am legitimately using the bathroom, so he said today at the end of the day today if I don’t send him a picture or otherwise prove that I used the bathroom, I will lose 15 minutes of paid time. What sort of recourse do I have?

WIRTW #553 (the “669” edition)

Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba (China’s answer to Amazon), claims that he has cracked the formula to a happy and productive workforce.

His answer? 669.

What does that mean? According to The Telegraph—

“We want 669 in life. What is 669? Six times in six days; the emphasis is on nine,” he said at a company gathering, referring to sex, and using a play on words, as the word “nine” in Mandarin is a homophone for the word “long.”

He wants his employees to have long sex six times every six days. 

And you thought American employers had issues?

Here’s what else I read this week.

Abortion discrimination = pregnancy discrimination

Thanks to, among other states, Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio (sorry about that last one), the debate over abortion is raging. Suppose you are staunchly anti-abortion, and you learn that one of your employees is considering, or has had, an abortion. Can you fire her?

Thus far, three courts have looked at this issue, and all three courts have all reached the same conclusion.

No.

No, the feds should not ban noncompetes because of #MeToo

A recent op-ed in the USAToday argues that the federal government should outlaw noncompete agreements because they trap workers in abusive workplaces.

Since women who complain about harassment face retaliation and even termination, often the only way to escape it is to find a new job. Yet for many women, continuing their careers with a new employer turns out to be impossible. 

That is because of noncomplete clauses. After they have resigned or even been fired, workers bound by noncompetes cannot accept employment in the same line of work or industry as their former employer for a specified period in a certain city, state or even the entire country. Nearly 30 million working people, including more than 12 million women, are locked into their jobs because of noncompete clauses.…

By depriving them of outside employment opportunities, noncompetes lock victims of harassment into abusive environments. 

I could not disagree more. Noncompete clauses are not responsible for trapping sexual harassment victims in abusive workplaces.

Ohio lawmakers seek to expand the protections of the Ohio Whistleblower Act

Laws protecting whistle-blowers from retaliation have a long and storied history in the annals of American law. Indeed, according to The Personal Toll of Whistleblowing, recently published in The New Yorker*, these laws date back 241 years to the American Revolution and the Second Continental Congress:

The first documented whistle-blowing case in the United States took place in 1777, not long after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when a group of naval officers, including Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven, witnessed their commanding officer torturing British prisoners of war. When they reported the misconduct to Congress, the commanding officer charged Shaw and Marven with libel, and both men were jailed. The following year, Congress passed a law protecting whistle-blowers, and Shaw and Marven were acquitted by a jury.

Crasslighting — Oops, #NotYou is NEVER a defense to #MeToo

Gaslighting — the manipulation of someone by psychological means to question their own sanity. It’s a term you’ve likely heard of.

But, have you heard of crasslighting? Me neither, until I read Did he just harass you or are you imagining it? You might be a victim of ‘crasslighting.’ in The Washington Post.