The Employer Handbook Blog

Employee — a grown man for God’s sake — claims he was fired for being a brony

October 9, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

Readers: A brony is a male fan of the children’s television show My Little Pony.

(This is the part where you let everything that you’ve read thus far sink in, as you watch this clip, close your office door, and laugh hysterically. Go ahead. It’s ok).

According to Gawker, the brony posted to Reddit that his co-workers gave him a raft of crap for setting his office computer screensaver to Applejack, a My Little Pony character.

Court destroys my “Ravishing Rick Rude” theory of same-sex harassment

October 7, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

Cut the music.

A little over a year ago, I wrote here about a steel worker named Kerry Woods. Unfortunately for Mr. Woods, he was on the receiving end of a constant barrage of “raw homophobic epithets and lewd gestures” from his supervisor. Notwithstanding, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out a $500K jury award for Mr. Woods, holding that Mr. Woods’s same-sex sexual harassment claims failed because he failed to satisfy the Supreme Court’s test in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc..

Oncale was another same-sex harassment case involving employees at an oil rig. In Oncale, the high court held that a jury may infer that same-sex harassment occurred because of sex when the plaintiff can produce:

Court holds that anxiety from possibly getting fired is an ADA disability.

October 4, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

Let me tell you about a teacher in South Dakota. In 2010, she received a letter communicating concerns about her performance. Subsequent evaluations of the teacher’s classes noted several deficiencies. So, the school placed the teacher on a performance improvement plan.

It was right around this time that the teacher met with a physician’s assistant, who diagnosed the teacher with “anxiety and depression, likely stemming from her concerns about possibly getting fired.”

So, at the teacher’s request, the physician’s assistant wrote a letter to the school seeking a laundry list of accommodations, including:

Fan gets fired for playing hooky to maintain his Yankee Stadium attendance streak

October 3, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

You’re probably thinking to yourself, “What kind of person cares that much about going to a baseball game that he would risk losing his job over it?”

The guy who hasn’t missed a Yankees home game for 38 years.

According to this CBS2 New York Report, Joseph Neubauer, who hadn’t missed a Yankees home game since the 1970’s, was fired from his position because he didn’t want to mess up an attendance streak at Yankee Stadium.

New PA bill would make the Commonwealth a right-to-work state

October 2, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

Before I get into the this new bill, let’s clear up a popular misconception: David Hasselhoff lives in my basement rent-free right-to-work means that an employee can be fired at any time for any non-discriminatory reason. No, dudes. That’s called at-will employment.

Right-to-work laws give individual employees in a unionized workplace the right not to join or financially support the union. 24 states, plus Guam, have passed right-to-work laws. Absent a right-to-work law, all employees in a collective bargaining unit must join the union and pay union dues.

And Pennsylvania could be next.

The golden rule of accommodating employees under the ADA

September 30, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

Last week, I talked about reasonable accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the importance of having an open-minded, respectful conversation with a disabled employee who requests an accommodation to perform the essential functions of the job. Ultimately, as I’ve discussed before, the employer (and not the employee) may insist upon a particular accommodation as will enable the employee to perform the essential functions of his job.

But is that always the best move?

Consider this recent case, in which a diabetic service technician requested that his employer provide him with an air conditioned vehicle to keep his insulin cold. Providing an air conditioned vehicle seems pretty reasonable to me. Instead, however, the company had a policy, which allowed all employees “take breaks at restaurants or other establishments to cool off on hot days.” Thus, the company claimed that this policy would be a accommodation and; therefore, the employee should not have refused it.

Telling an employee to “focus on her health” is not disability discrimination

September 27, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

Rather, it’s just being — oh what’s that word — ‘human.’

Like in this case, in which a supervisor with breast cancer was disciplined — yes, folks, you can reprimand an employee with an ADA “disability” or FMLA “serious health condition” — for allegedly calling other employees names such as “idiot,” “moron,” and “dumbass;” and also striking a few of them on the head for good measure. The supervisor-plaintiff was then demoted and given a pay cut commensurate with the other deputy clerks at her position. When told of the demotion and pay cut, her boss also mentioned that “she should probably focus on her health rather than worry about the stress of supervising people.”

My heavens! I’ve caught the vapors. A boss who expresses concern for the welfare of his employees. Sounds like a terrible place to work!

6 keys to having your age discrimination release hold up in court

September 26, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

You’re about to have a reduction in force and you’re going to offer a severance package to those effected: one week of salary for every year of service in exchange of a full release of all claims. If one or more employees affected by the reduction in force is 40 years of age or older, you’d better make sure that your release language complies with the the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (“ADEA”), as amended by the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act (“OWBPA”). Unlike other general releases, by statute, an ADEA/OWBPA release must have certain required elements for it to be effective.

One employer, in this recent case, learned the hard way. The employer RIFed the plaintiffs, but failed to inform them “about the group of employees who were being terminated as a result of the reorganization or about employees who were not selected for termination,” as the law requires. Consequently, the age discrimination release that the plaintiff signed wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

Kinda like this blog.

Employee asks court to stop company from making her work Saturdays

September 25, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

Sounds like someone’s taken a page out of the Lionel Hutz playbook.

Patrice Williams is a Seventh-Day Adventist. Seventh-Day Adventists believe that the Sabbath runs from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Because of her sincerely-held religious beliefs, Ms. Williams requested that her employer not require her to work during the Sabbath, to which the employer allowed her to do so through a combination of swapping shifts with co-workers, using vacations days, using sick days, scheduling doctors appointments, and other means.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVPG-jnehr0But, that wasn’t good enough for Ms. Williams.

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