WIRTW #639: the “Gr8” edition

How does your organization help build collegiality among employees?

At my kids' school they do it in the Lower and Middle School with Family Groups, and in the Upper School with Houses (just like in Harry Potter, complete with a year-long House Cup competition). 

Each Family Group or House is comprised of a cross-grade mix of students. The goal is to build school spirit, classmate and faculty camaraderie, and student leadership skills.

One of the Middle School's best traditions is Community Building Days, two days of non-academic activities shortly after the start of the school year to help everyone get to know one another better. It always takes place on the Thursday and Friday of the second week of school (yesterday and today), and the entire Middle School sleeps over at school on Thursday night.

One additional rite of passage for the middle schoolers is what's known as "Gr8 Night." They sleep over at school for one additional night, the Wednesday night leading into Community Building Days, to further build their leadership skills and to decorate the Middle School in preparation for the arrival of the 6th and 7th graders the next day.

Yesterday morning, the 8th graders welcomed everyone driving onto campus (that's Donovan, in yellow on the left). He looked excited and happy, (relatively) well rested, and ready to tackle what the faculty has to throw at him over the next two days. I can't wait to hear all about it.

Employers, what are you doing to help build camaraderie and collegiality among your employees? The past two and a half pandemic years have been rough on workplace morale and teamwork. I'm curious to learn what you're doing to help bring back some of the sense of "team" that the pandemic and remote work stole from us? Drop a note in the comments below and I'll share some the best or more interesting ideas in a future post.

Here's what I read and listened to this past week that I think you should be reading and hearing, too.

The wage and hour implications of employee electronic surveillance

Every now and again I come across a story that make me question how any in-house counsel blessed a workplace policy or practice.

The following story, taken from yesterday's episode of The Daily on the rise of workplace surveillance, is one of those stories.

Carol works as a Vice President for a bank. Like many white-collar employees these days, she's working remotely from her home. Pretty early on in her employment, she begins to notice that her paychecks are light. Then she figures out why.

Every 10 minutes at random points the company took a screenshot of her computer monitor and a photo of her face. The company was using that information to pay Carol (and every other worker) only for the minutes when they appeared be active according to the photos. If, for example, the photo happened to capture Carol during a moment of inactivity (for example, a 30-second interval when she went to get a cup of coffee), it would dock her for the entire 10-minute span. As you can imagine, the digital tracking actually missed a lot of Carol's work, including any work she did offline. She's working, but the company thinks she's not working, and it's going to dock for that any perceived increments of inactivity. 

There are two HUGE Fair Labor Standards Act red flags here.

Pro athletes should never get a pass on harassment

Kenny Lofton is one of the most beloved players in history of the Cleveland Guardians, née Indians. He spent the best years of 17-year career anchoring center field for the Cleveland teams that won six AL Central titles and earned two World Series berths. 

Post-baseball, Lofton founded Centerblock Asset Management LLC, an investment firm and NFT workplace. In addition to his corporate gig, it also appears that Lofton allegedly spends his time messaging women pictures of his Li'l Kenny on Instagram and firing employees to take issue with it.

“Gaslighting” in the workplace

“That’s not how I told you to complete that project. Why did you do it that way? It’s all wrong.”

“Why didn’t you show up to the meeting? Of course I invited you.”

“Harassment complaint? You never made any harassment complaint.”

These are all examples of gaslighting in the workplace.

Lessons from Platform Beer’s mass layoff

According to Scene Magazine, late last week Platform Beer Co. notified between 25 and 30 of its local brewery employees that their employment was no longer needed. They were laid off. 

That facility brews, tests, cans, packages, and warehouses most of Platform's offerings. The impacted employees were offered severance packages in accordance with their age and tenure. 

When I hear "mass layoff," I immediately think of the WARN Act. WARN stands for Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification. It's the federal statute that requires 60 days' advance notice of mass layoff or plant closure (or 60 days' pay in lieu of the notice). But it does not apply to every mass layoff or plant closure, only those of a large enough employer that impacts a large enough number of employees.

WIRTW #638: the “DriveThru” edition

Episode 2 of Labor Relatedly, my new podcast endeavor with Mike VanDervort is live everywhere you listen to podcasts. In this episode we discuss the controversy surrounding the Deshaun Watson arbitration ruling, Chipotle writing a $20 million dollar check to settle a wage and hour case in New York, how the Duty of Fair Representation impacts the relationship between unions and employers, and what some common-sense labor law reform might look like.

Here's what I read this past week that I think you should be reading, too.

How do you respond when your employees are threatened?

Boston Children's Hospital has a scary situation on its hand. Its hospital staff has received aggressive phone calls, emails, and death threats. It's all in reaction to inaccurate information posted on conservative websites and shared across social media about its transgender surgery program.

The allegations are that its medical staff performs hysterectomies on girls under the age of 18. In reality, the hospital performs hysterectomies on patients age 18 and older, but not on children.

Boston Children's began treating transgender youth in 1998 and opened the first trans health program in the U.S. for adolescents in 2007.

Walmart wins discrimination claim brought on behalf of pregnant employees unable to work

Consider the following two policies:

• Employees injured on the job will be offered Temporary Alternative Duty ("TAD") — light duty that enables the injured workers to keep working and earning their full wages while complying with any relevant medical restrictions.

-vs-

• Pregnant employees with lifting or other physical restrictions related to pregnancy are required to go on an unpaid leave of absence, and no TAD is or will be made available.

In EEOC v. Walmart Stores East, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that despite the existence of the former, the latter did not discriminate against Walmart's pregnant employees.

The CDC is the tail wagging the public’s dog

Last week the CDC updated its Covid isolation guidelines. The agency says it's "to help the public better protect themselves and understand their risk." 

Most importantly, there is no longer any distinction between those who are fully vaccinated and those who are unvaccinated against the virus. Instead, the CDC says anyone can end isolation after five days if asymptomatic or if fever-free for 24 hours and other symptoms are improving. Thereafter, one should mask around others either through day 10 or sooner after two sequential negative tests 48 hours apart.

HR may not be employees’ “friend,” but it’s also not their enemy

As the former Microsoft VP of HR I can assure you that HR is not your friend.

That headline from a BusinessInsider article written by Chris Williams, Microsoft's former head of HR from 1997 thru 2000, caught my eye. 

He writes: "Do not see your team's HR representative as a friend. … HR is not your friend. … [T]hey are not paid to be the employee's ally."

On the one hand, Williams is correct. HR is not an employee's friend. But by framing the issue as such, he is suggesting that HR is an employee's enemy. That distinction is damaging. HR is neither friend nor foe of employees. It's their partner. If this is not how HR is working within your company, you need to reexamine why you have HR in the first place.

WIRTW #637: the “down on the farm” edition

I grew up in Philadelphia and attended City of Philadelphia public schools. My high school had 4,500 students and was surrounded by barbed wire fencing. In a lot of ways, it felt more like a prison than a school.

My kids attend cushy suburban private school. It's a luxury that I'm happy to be able to provide to them. They have a wooded 93-acre campus to explore, small class sizes, a unique curriculum not tied to state-mandated requirements, and now an actual farm that doubles as an outdoor experiential classroom. As far as I know it's the only such outdoor space in NE Ohio. 

Dubbed "Aspiration Acres," Lake Ridge Academy dedicated this new addition to our campus earlier this week. It has gardens, a silo, a barn, and a chicken coop with live chickens. Later this year the school will dedicate our new outdoor woodland all-purpose trail, complete with parkour obstacles and a sugar shack that will provide a permanent home for the 2nd the 5th graders' annual maple sugaring. 

For more information, I encourage you to visit lakeridgeacademy.org.

Here's what I read this past week that I think you should be reading, too.

Consistency matters when applying anti-harassment rules

Can an employer legally fire an employee who writes "whore board" on an overtime sign-up sheet? Let's explore.

Following unsuccessful negotiations for a new union contract, Constellium unilaterally implemented a new overtime policy that required employees to sign up for overtime on a sheet posted on a bulletin board outside the lunchroom.

Employees were not happy about the new policy. Those who opposed it began calling the overtime sign-up sheet a "whore board," as they believed that those who used it to sign up for overtime were selling out their union. "Whore board" quickly became common slang in the workplace (even among supervisors). There was no evidence that Constellium disciplined anyone for saying the vulgarity.

One employee, Jack Williams, went a step further. He wrote "whore board" on the sign-up sheet. Constellium then fired him for "willfully and deliberately engaging in insulting and harassing conduct."

Employee too distraught to work over Dobbs decision loses job

I haven't been shy about hiding my disgust over Dobbs, the end of constitutional protections for abortion, and the threat to reproductive, women's and other fundamental rights that our nation currently faces. 

Michael Lopez was also disgusted; so disgusted, in fact, that he couldn't even work. Lopez was a production coordinator at Universal Music Enterprises, whose job included processing a weekly Friday report of upcoming releases. Except the Friday that the Supreme Court released Dobbs, Lopez was too upset to do his job. Instead, he sent the following email to his co-workers:

Do you know what to do and not to do when federal agents arrive with a search warrant?

The front door to your business opens, and in walks a column of federal agents with boxes, computer imaging equipment, and a search warrant.

Do you what to do and what not to do? Does your business have appropriate response procedures in place? Any have you trained the person most likely to receive the agents (a receptionist, for example) on how to appropriately respond?

Here are some suggestions.

Does craft beer have a labor problem?

Does craft beer have a labor problem? Julie Rhodes, writing at PorchDrinking, sure thinks so. 

She cites low wages and labor conditions as the two main drivers of her conclusion. 

WIRTW #636: the “what the heck” edition

Another week, another podcast appearance. This week you can catch me on What the Heck is Happening in HR, discussing all things employee handbooks.

Here's what I read this past week that I think you should be reading, too.

Alex Jones trial offers a teachable moment on the issue of "inadvertent disclosure”

Suppose you're sitting in your office and your associate excitedly runs in, yelling, "We got 'em! The other side just sent us the entire contents of their client's cell phone, and oh boy are there some smoking guns!"

This exact issue just played out in an Austin, Texas, courtroom in the defamation trial between online conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and the parents of a 6-year-old killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting suing him for lying that the attack was a hoax. The parents had requested in discovery that Jones turn over all emails and text messages related to the shooting. Jones claimed that none existed because he doesn't email or text. Then 12 days ago his lawyer accidentally sent the entire contents of Jones's cell phone to the parents' attorneys.

What happened next would seem laughable if it unfolded during a prime-time legal drama. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of these events unfolding in court, a former writer for Law & Order tweeted that they "wouldn't have let a lawyer do something that dumb." And yet it actually happened yesterday in an actual courtroom.

Alex Jones, seconds after being told that his lawyer mistakenly send a huge cache of texts to Sandy Hook families’ attorney:

“This is your Perry Mason moment” pic.twitter.com/f6byn6N6VA

— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) August 3, 2022

"Your attorneys messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cellphone with every text message you've sent for the past two years. And when informed they did not take any steps to identify it as privileged.… And that is how I know you lied to me about not having any text messages about Sandy Hook."

You won’t like OSHA when it’s angry

OSHA has proposed nearly $1.25 million in penalties against two Ohio Dollar Tree stores. 

The specific violations cited include hazards related to obstructed egress, unstable stacks, and inaccessible electrical equipment and fire extinguishers, in addition to trip and fall hazards caused by water leaking through the ceiling, carts, boxes, trash and merchandise spread throughout walking-working surfaces in the retail areas and storerooms.

These two sets of citation, however, only tell part of the story. 

Accountability starts at the top, even for the NFL

NFL disciplinary officer Sue L. Robinson has suspended Deshaun Watson for six games for his violation of the league's personal conduct policy based on allegations by four masseuses that he solicited prostitution by paying for sex acts.

Some see six games as a slap on the wrist. I don't, at least in the environment that bound Judge Robinson and her ruling.

While I don't in any way condone Watson's misconduct, the NFL would place itself in serious legal jeopardy by imposing a suspension that encourages Watson or his union to litigate.

Don’t be mad at Watson for getting off light; be mad at the NFL for its long history of giving white male owners a free pass for their own sexual misconduct. The league created the legal environment that let Watson (a Black player) off.

NLRB dismisses charges against lawyers for alleged “union busting” against the employees of its client … but let’s not celebrate yet

One law firm has been at the center of most of the recent high-profile anti-union organizing efforts in large multi-state employers such as Starbucks, Apple, and Trader Joe's — Littler Mendelson. The Service Employees International Union filed an unfair labor practice charge against that law firm and its responsible attorneys alleging that they violated the National Labor Relations Act by illegally polling Starbucks' employees about their support for the union. 

Thankfully, the NLRB has now dismissed that charge.