Count your blessings, Homer? Your boss isn’t so bad after all!
We must place the word “alleged” in front of all of this, for it is just a law suit at this point, but if the outrageous conduct described in the complaint made by Albert Sultan against his former boss, Manhattan real estate broker Jack Terzi, is even close to true, Terzi may be the Tin Standard against which all other abusive employers should be judged.
Sultan says in his 15-page lawsuit that he was hired by Terzi in 2009, shortly after Terzi started his real estate business. After three years of Terzi’s reign of terror, Sultan says, he became “emotionally distraught, humiliated and embarrassed” by “systematic and continuous unlawful harassment” at the hands of his tyrannical and abusive boss, who, among other things…
- Made him perform personal tasks not in his job description, such as parking Terzi’s car and bringing him coffee.
- Required him to work a 60-hour week, including 26 Sundays annually, with no sick days or vacation.
- Cheated him out of six months salary and commissions worth $129,320.
Wait! I haven’t gotten to the juicy stuff yet!
In addition, Sultan alleges, Terzi…
- Set up a series of fines for office transgressions, such as $15 a minute for arriving late to work, $30 a minute for leaving early, and a whopping $1,000 for missing a scheduled Sunday.
- Frequently abused Sultan verbally, calling him a “fucking idiot” and a “piece of shit’.”
- Threw a shoe and a pair of scissors at him.
- Sneezed in his face intentionally and repeatedly.
The pièce de résistance, however, and the allegation that will enshrine Jack Terzi in the Abusive Bosses Hall of Infamy if true, is this:
- Sultan says that on at least one occasion Terzi urinated on his clothes in front of co-workers!
Terzi’s lawyer denies Sultan’s claims, of course, which if invented have to comprise one of the most creative and audacious fabricated employment law suits I’ve ever seen. He is counter-suing, also “of course,” saying that the suit is designed to deflect attention away from the fact that Sultan methodically stole Terzi’s clients and violated a strict non-compete agreement. It’s quite possible, of course, that both Terzi and Sultan are correct about what the other did. Violating non-compete agreements, however, while wrong and actionable (if the court doesn’t find that the non-compete clause is unfairly restrictive and thus unenforceable, which courts often do), is unremarkable. Urinating on your employee, however, is truly the signature of a boss from Hell.
I do have a question, though. Why would Sultan work for such a monster for three years? I’ve always had an ironclad rule regarding jobs, myself.
Once the boss urinates on me, I’m gone.
________________________
Pointer: Fark
Facts: Daily News
Graphic: Winorperish
Special Thanks: Reader Ulrike Lerche, who showed me how to accent pièce de résistance.
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
I, for one, am stalwartly hoping that “urinating on employees” remains squarely in the realm of Ethics and not Law–as in, becoming an official OSHA requirement.
The lost productivity from the millions of employees laughing their collective asses off after reading the (mandatory, of course) sign on the break room bulletin board would add up to BILLIONS of dollars!
–Dwayne
“…on at least one occasion…”? Could have happened more often?
I’m thinking Sultan was not the brightest bulb on that tree. IMO every complaint after the first six months gets tossed. After taking that kinda crap that long Sultan had to know what was in store for him, and everything after that must be considered as tacitly accepted by his acquiescence.
I think Terzi was once my customer. Or somebody just like him.
I think it goes a bit far to say that he consented to being abused by remaining. We wouldn’t say that about an abused spouse. Who knows why he stayed–I can think of reasons. Not good ones, at least if it were me, but he wasn’t consenting to abuse, just submitting to it.