Woman fired for being irresistable

This is an example of what can happen when the employment relationship shifts to a friendship and extends outside of the work environment. It can easily happen through 10 years of daily close proximity. Being "friendly" can help make the workplace more pleasant, but being "friends" can be detrimental. These folks made a mistake in letting the relationship become too personal. There is blame to be shared on all sides, but....

The dentist was wrong to start making comments about Ms. Nelson's appearance and the "bulge in his pants." At most, he would have been better off merely suggesting she tone down her attire.

Ms. Nelson might have been better advised to pursue a sexual harassment tact in her suit, rather than gender discrimination. If there were any witnesses to Dr. Knight's inappropriate remarks, she would have had a slam dunk.

Dr. Knight is an idiot for having compromising texts on his phone for his wife to discover. It's obvious to me that his wife's jealousy/insecurity was the instigator here. To appease her, Knight gutlessly placed the blame on Nelson's "irresistible" attractiveness. Getting the pastor to condone the whole episode was a brilliantly devious maneuver, though.

In my opinion, Knight is slimy, his wife is petty, the pastor is misogynous and Nelson is a complicit victim. A boss and a worker becoming friends is almost always a mistake, especially if they are of the opposite sex.

 

cynthetiq. Why do I like you more and more?

I'm not sure I agree with the appellate court's "question presented" but nonetheless still agree with the concept of 'at will' employment and its progeny.

 

Not knowing the law that applies there it may be that the court came to the only conclusion they could.

This whole "at will" thing strikes me as pretty awful. From what I can tell, if an employee does everything that is required in their job they can still be fired "at will" with only minimal grounds for redress (mostly on grounds of discrimination). To me, every worker should have some security of employment and some minimum protection. If the business is going under they may have to be laid off. That's fair enough (but should come with some level of minimum severance pay),

In this case, had it happened over here and the woman had been fired, she may have had a case for constructive dismissal. This is due to the fact that her boss was complicit in creating the situation that got her fired. His role should be recognised.

It may well be that the situation had reached a point where she could no longer work there (but he should never have allowed that to happen). In this case, I would expect a discussion and an offer of a good severance package (a few months sounds right) and a good reference. After 10 years service, a minimum package for redundancy would be ten weeks notice (which could be paid in lieu of working) and a further 10 weeks pay. If a job is made redundant, you can't hire someone else into the same role, so it may be that a compromise agreement needed to be reached. This would normally be a better package than redundancy. All such payments are tax free up to £30,000 (around $45,000).

Firing her after 10 years service, given that she relies on an income to provide for her family, seems ... harsh. Of course, there may be more to the case, but I can only go on what has been presented.

 

Take a look at the full opinion here:

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2012/images/12/21/11-1857.pdf

I'm not an employment lawyer, and I'm not entirely familiar with civil rights laws. That said, the employee brought a gender discrimination claim against the Dentist. While I agree that it's unfair, I think the firing here was not caused solely by her status as a female--but more so the actions on each party's part. I wonder if there was a legitimate sexual harassment claim that wasn't plead, or if this was a case of bad lawyering.

Regardless, the crux of the firing arose out of the wife's jealousy. The Dentist fired the employee for that. I don't think that goes towards a 'protected status.' Does it?

 

Well, given that the court is there to apply the law, they probably came to the only decision they could, legally.

Sucks, though.

 

At will employment rarely, if ever, benefits the employee, despite the language offered up in employment contracts that states the employee may resign without giving notice (as if that wasn't always and forever the case). Among other reasons for the overall damage it's caused, the At Will option for employers is one of the major reasons for high turnover rates in almost every industry in the US and the reason why service to customers is at an all time low. If it's beneficial to the employer to fire an employee with 10 + years of experience for the purpose of saving money on hiring someone with less experience at a lower wage rate....Thy will be done. At will employment was adopted for just this purpose and we are living with the results.

So please tell me why do you agree with the concept, Kirstang and do you work in the private or the public sector? It's my impression that At Will employment is not an aspect of government employment, but I could be wrong.

For the record, she obviously had an ass for a lawyer. Clearly this was not a gender discrimination case and I can now see why the court decided the way it did. She may have had a case based on harassment but either she or her lawyer chose not to pursue it. She may have had a case for being fired without just cause but no such cause exists outside of Montana.

 

Funny how things change. I was brought up to believe that the purpose of any business organisation is to provide employment, to create loyal customers and grow the market.

The "provide employment" bit is key. Why would we otherwise accept the relationship? We didn't always organise into businesses and there has to be a balance.

The alternative is to have a fearful and insecure society that .... oh... wait.

Never mind.

 

I'm sorry, but that's one hell of an arrogant "business owner's" perspective.

Any business organisation is inextricably linked to its entire environment. To differentiate the business (owners, fiscal shareholders) and the environment (customers, employees, stakeholders in general, partner companies, manufacturers, competitors, the economy, affected communities, etc) as completely independent entities, is to make a fundamental mistake in assessing how and why organisations exist.

Alistair touched on this already, and the expansion of the "provide employment, create loyal customers and grow the market" clause is the Stakeholder Theory. Read up on it.

A very good book by Chris Grey, a Warwick Business School organizational theorist, also highlights the common misconception that managerial relationships to employees is a one-way matter. It also does a very good job of explaining why attitudes such as yours exist.

There are, of course, certain privileges to being an owner/managing director and employees are arguably subject to a higher degree of arbitrary decision-making in small businesses, but to state it in a simple black/white picture the way you have is immensely disagreeable.

Oh, and I am an employer. It's a great point you brought up there, because it is completely irrelevant when discussing a topic like this.

Whether small or big, a firm is always in the realm of business ethics.

 

No, it's not at all difficult to understand. A small business owner puts his heart and soul into his business. Hopefully, he hires employees that he feels will benefit the company because his company cannot prosper without them. Occasionally, they will not work out. Why? Well, maybe they're thieves (fire them) or maybe they're rude with customers (fire them) or maybe they are consistently antagonist towards management or other employees (fire them) or maybe they continuously call in sick or are tardy 2 days out of 5 (fire them).

But what if they perform in accordance with their job description and abide by the rules of the company? If they are being fired because they've worked their way up to a high salary, then doesn't some of the fault lie with the employer for increasing the employee's salary to a rate which proved unsustainable? One would assume that if salary raises were offered or requested, the owner would have had a handle on his own financial position and the salaries would be given or denied based on what the owner felt was within his ability to pay. To fire someone because you can no longer afford them is to admit that you have been irresponsible in hiring them at a certain salary, for allowing their salary to grow or maybe the issue is due to a downturn in the market. Should they be let go anyway? Yes. If the business is suffering financially, owners need make cuts where they can. But if the employee was in no way responsible for the financial situation the owner finds himself in, why should the employee bear the entire brunt through lose of income?

Employment is a contractual relationship. Always has been. Employer will do X,Y, & Z. Employee will provide X, Y & Z. If A, B, or C occurs, the actions will be thus.

There are legitimate reasons to fire an employee. Firing an employee because she gives you a hard on is not legitimate and has nothing to do with the "business." or work performance or the fact that she doesn't do the job she was hired to do. No, it's strictly personal. In business terms, his behavior and preoccupation with her was as much a threat to his "business" as her irresistibility. It's precisely because he is the small business owner that the responsibility falls to him. So why is she the one out in the cold financially? Again, I'm not saying that she should have been retained but she damn well sure should have been compensated for the portion of fault that lay with the owner.

It is about the business, Lindy but it's also about the rights of an employee to be compensated in the event that an employer, through no whole fault of the employee's, has put the business in jeopardy. Employees are not second class citizens. They remain a vital aspect of the complex machinery that runs the capitalist engine. To believe otherwise is in an indication of your lack of understanding of the big picture, as you focus too intently on your own little pixel.

 

At-will employees are not people, they're commodities. It's that simple.

 

If this woman is indeed too irresistible, how can she ever find employment again?

 

No, because they already had this "benefit" prior to the conception of "employment at will." Employers did not. Quitting a job with 2 weeks notice is pretty much a universal practice and had been long before lawyers, legislators and corporate loophole finders decided to dress it up and make it look like they invented it as a quid pro quo . If a new hire isn't intelligent enough to know going into the job what almost every employee knows - that the "at will" option is a benefit for employers and a toothless redundancy for employees - they probably aren't qualified for the position.

 

I'm not seeing your point here, cynthetiq. What does firing employees for cause have to do with "At will?" Employers have always been able to fire employees for just cause with no notice and no compensation. The "At will" advantage for employers is that now they can also fire employees without just cause with no notice and no compensation. On the flip side, I think it's common practice and understandable for a business to reject an exiting employee's notice period, for precisely the reasons you mentioned. In that scenario though, I would fully expect a respectable and reputable business to compensate for at least the notice period.

In the US, contracted employment is quite a bit different than permanent employment. Contracts and terms are negotiated between both the employer and the contractor and the contractor is not considered to be an employee of the company. The benefit to each and expectations of each, is outlined in the contract. Both parties can be held libel for breach of this contract. In terms of benefit, it offers equitable benefit to both parties, by way of the terms negotiated.

On the other hand, an office worker taking a permanent, full time position as an employee of the company will be provided a standard terms of employment document. If employment is "at will", this is where the language is likely to be present. There is no negotiating. The employer has always been able to fire employees for "just cause" but "at will" now allows him to fire them without just cause or without providing any compensation or severance pay. "At will" offers substantially more to the employer as it relinquishes him of the need to negotiate any fairness or liability into the relationship.
This would be the benefit to the employer in the "at will" arrangement.

A two weeks notice period is a courtesy and always has been. No employee has ever been required to give one. Which makes my point about the redundancy of the employee's "at will" benefit. If I work for a company that is not an "at will" employer I can quit with or without giving notice. I can do exactly the same if I work for a company that is not an "at will" employer.

So unless I've been missing something, there is no benefit to working for an "at will" employer vs. an employer that does not include it in it's employment policies.

We can discuss whether the "at will" arrangement levels the playing field for employers as they can NOW do what the employee has always had the advantage of being able to do. Terminate the relationship at will. Maybe it's fair, but is it the best way to run a business? I think that is open for discussion.

But it's disingenuous to say that "employment at will" has in any way been designed to give an employee an advantage he didn't already have. It was designed solely to give an employer the same advantage the employee has always had.

That's my only point, really.

 

Oh my God. That is hilarious.

First, your ignorance of the business ethics field of study is as transparent as water is wet. Let's not even go there, since explaining the many ramifications and reaches of business ethics takes way too much time for me to explain to a sufficient degree than I have right now.

Second, Walmart? Are you kidding? I did an extensive case study of Walmart's business practices and its ethical conflicts only 3 months ago. They affect the local communities and small businesses wherever they put their gigantic store clusters, they get unfair subsidies from the US federal government to be established in those communities and to drive small businesses into bankruptcy.

Just recently, Walmart faced a class action suit for systemic managerial malpractice against women (it may have been dismissed and the judges decided each case has to be heard individually, but the individual cases are strong nonetheless).

Walmart has horrendous public safety regulations, is known to dump toxic waste in the environment of their stores' nearby communities, has immense ethical issues in its employment contracts, maintains a rigorous and draconian anti-union (any type of union) stance, carries out overwhelming negotiations with individual employees while maintaining their immense bargaining power, and is switching most employees to "At Will" so they can maintain the low wages they pay.

And third, there has never been a need for an ethics police. Walmart's intensely-flawed business and managerial practices produces PR nightmare after nightmare, where documentaries (such as "the High Cost of Low Price") get produced on just how bad they are, and forcing it to constantly act in a reactionary manner, having to establish crap like a "War Room" in order to improve their horrible image in the public's eye, spending millions upon millions to fix things that could have been easily prevented. The ramifications of business ethics always come back to bite incompetent/unscrupulous business owners and managers in the ass, one way or another.

To address your point properly, though: The only reason Walmart has even any remote grounds to disagree with me, is American employment and business laws. Your government doesn't hold big business accountable for shit. They don't bother, because the existing laws are flimsy at best and provide a plethora of loopholes for companies to slip through. You don't have business accountability offices that can actually prosecute companies of that size; America as a whole lacks a proper understanding of fair business practices; and constant streams of anti-government slogans (i.e. "everything needs to be unregulated!") impede said government to implement ethical legislation and prosecute exploitative businesses.

Yet, despite all that, Walmart faces new conflicts, lawsuits, PR debacles and bad publicity every day. It is a mistake to think that because there is a dysfunctional system in the US, that business ethics doesn't exist and doesn't cause immense issues.

 

In the spirit of good faith discussion, let me posit this to you, Remixer: How do you reconcile workers rights with the recent and quite noisy Bankruptcy of Hostess? It appears that the workers' bargaining power was so great as to sink the golden goose--and now 15,000 people are without work.

 

You really drank that koolaid? Why, because of all the corporations that have failed during the recession, Hostess is one who happened to still have unions?

The Free Market Killed Hostess, And That’s A Good Thing
--- merged: Dec 25, 2012 at 6:01 PM ---

There are some occupations where it pays to be irresistible. Not sure how her husband and kids would take it, though.