We Have Moved!

Yes friends, it’s time once again to issue our Questionable HR Management Award Grand Prize. As you know we periodically hand out this prestigious award to a company that has shown particularly bad HR judgment and a complete lack of common sense.

Today the award goes to Packaging Corporation of America in Counce, Tenn. for its inadvisable termination of an employee in response to said employee’s election to the Mississippi State Senate. According to the Clarion Ledger, Freshman state Sen. Eric Powell learned two days after his swearing-in last week that he had been fired from his regular job. Powell, said his firing came as a result of his election as a state senator in Mississippi.

“All of a sudden, with no phone call or anything, just a letter in the mail after 11 1/2 years of service,” said Powell, who is married and has three children. “That’s the kind of thanks I get for hard work and loyalty. It’s the kind of thing I came to the Senate on behalf of working people to fight.”

Labor Prof Blog, who put me on to the story, noted that it seems pretty clear that the termination was directly related to Mr. Powell’s election. This was especially boneheaded given the fact that the company initially encouraged Powell in his run for office.

Now thanks to this bizarre HR snafu, instead of having an employee in the state senate, PCA likely has:

1) a union grievance (Powell was a union member and the collective bargaining agreement specifically allows for employee leave when running for public office and only requires resignation if the office obtained is a full-time job);

2) a lawsuit (many states have statutory prohibitions on retaliation against employees for serving in public office); and

3) a state senator that is less than enamored with the company.

We therefore proudly award Packaging Corporation of America our Questionable HR Management Award! Feel free to print out the award emblem and wear it with pride.

Just came across a good article at Law.com dealing with the implementation of new e-discovery rules that are forcing companies to turn over damning evidence that has been stored electronically.

General Counsels are pulling their hair out trying to educate their managers and others that email often lasts forever and that they should not opine as to the reason an employee was fired, etc. using email.

The article features several types of emails that cause the most trouble. Some of my favorite opening lines from emails:

“Don’t put this in writing, but … ”

“This is off the record,” started the e-mail that in fact put it all on the record; and

“We may be in breach of contract, and here’s why.”

And of course there are the HR-related emails:

“I can’t believe she’s pregnant at such an inconvenient time at work.” and

“we need to get rid of the dead wood.”

The message is clear: Employers must continue to train and retrain employees on what is an is not appropriate subject matter for an email. And for Plaintiffs, be diligent about seeking production of emails in discovery. There’s gold in them there hills.

Women are a powerful and valuable force in today’s workplace. They represent some of the best and brightest that industry has to offer, but many organizations aren’t set up to properly attract and retain them. The HR World Editors have put together a list of 100 resources designed to help your organization recruit and retain talented female employees.

Source: HR World Editors

Peter Mullison over at the Colorado Employment Law Blog has a good article on employee privacy in the workplace, or more specifically, the lack thereof. Peter discusses the Court’s opinion in United States v. Barrows, a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals decision finding that an employee did not have a protected privacy interest in the child pornography files found by a co-worker on this personal computer that he brought to work.

The analysis in this case is slightly more involved because the employer in question was a government entity and therefore state action was at issue. In cases involving employees of private employers, the employee’s positions would be even weaker.

Mullison points out two rules to live by:

1) Stay away from kiddie porn; and

2) Recognize that your privacy rights in the workplace are less than you might think.

Good rules.

Source: Colorado Employment Law Blog

This is a question that I get quite often from employees: What are the limits of what I can say in the workplace? The answer is usually “Not as much as you think.” Many employees are surprised to learn that, generally speaking, employees of private sector employers have no constitutional “free speech” rights in the workplace.

The Delaware News Journal has an article on the limits of free speech in the workplace that employees would do well to read if they have questions in this are.

We have previously covered instances in which employees have been fired for posting something on their blog that their employer did appreciate. With the advent of Facebook, MySpace and other social media, the problem is only becoming more acute.

Employers are wisely beginning to respond to the situation by publishing their own policies governing such communications. You can find IBM’s blogging policy here. And here is Yahoo’s policy as to personal blogs.

If your company does not have its own policy yet, you might give these two policies a look to get a general idea as to what an employer’s expectations will likely be regarding its employee’s conduct in the online world.

The WARN Act is one of those areas that everybody needs a refresher course in now and again. Most HR officers (and frankly many HR lawyers) deal with it infrequently at best. To the rescue comes Diane M. Pfadenhauer or Strategic HR Lawyer Blog, and her article: “BEYOND THE WARN NOTICE: GETTING TO THE TIPPING POINT AND BEYOND”

I commend it to your reading.

As more companies adopt workplace models in which employees work from home, it has become more important for managers to learn to communicate and supervise, as well as foster teamwork among employees who work remotely, without the benefit of frequent face-to-face contact in a regular office setting.

Here is a good article from the Wall Street Journal addressing the topic.

Hat tip to Home Office Lawyer Blog for the link.

Most employers believe that if they set up an at-will system and police it vigorously they will be safe from lawsuits. However, despite almost universal acceptance of at-will relationships in the United States, employment litigation is on the rise and is now a large percentage of cases on court dockets. A recent article by Ellen Dannin gives thoughtful consideration to the at-will doctrine and whether it still serves a useful purpose.

In her article, she notes that dissatisfaction with at-will doctrine has led courts and legislatures to develop many common law contract, tort doctrines and statutory exceptions, leading to greater complexity and uncertainty. By now most bad reasons for firing workers have been made illegal, so an at-will regime is limited to firing workers for a good reason or no reason. It also seems unlikely that most employers want to fire their employees for no reason, because, by definition, this means firing good employees. Thus the so-called “at will” doctrine is reduced to one in name only. Her article asks what is the benefit to employers of this strategy. . . and what is the alternative.

Source: LaborProf Blog

Working America blog has announced its winners in its “My Bad Boss” contest. The winner? A boss that through out an employee’s leave paperwork, causing him to lose out on any pay for days missed due to cancer treatment. Now that is bad.

There is a new federal minimum wage and with it comes a new minimum wage poster. All employers subject to the FLSA must display the poster. Fortunately, you need not go out and buy one. The Department of Labor has been kind enough to produce a printer-ready file of the required poster that you can download straight from their website.

You can get the poster here.