Workplace

And You Think YOU Have An Abusive Boss!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

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! Continue reading →

The Pasco School District (Florida) Flunks Its “Cone of Shame” Lesson

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Isn’t this hilarious? The student looks just like that funny animated dog!

Laurie Bailey-Cutkomp is, among other things that I will enumerate as we go, a  science teacher who until recently was employed at Zephyrhills High School in Dade County.  The Pasco School District fired her for devising and employing a unique form of punishment for misbehaving students: she placed them in a wide plastic collar of the sort used by veterinarians to keep dogs from licking their stitched up wounds, what the talking dogs in Disney’s  animated film “Up” amusingly called “the Cone of Shame.” But they were dogs, and they were animated. The Cone of Shame isn’t funny on kids, except maybe to Ms. Bailey-Cutkomp.

Then the same school district that fired her, following negotiations and a settlement agreement, allowed another school in the same district, Middle School, to hire her to teach science there.

Oh, darn…my head just exploded all over my computer screen! There…it’s wiped off now. Continue reading →

The Difference Between Unemployed Scientists and Unemployed Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

A front page story in today’s Washington Post casts interesting perspective on an Ethics Alarms rumble that broke out here a couple of weeks ago. One of the many websites where underemployed, over-indebted law grads hang out to commiserate—sites with pathetic names like “butidideverythingrightorsoithought”—discovered a post from the days when people were taking Occupy Wall Street seriously, in which I chided a protester whose sign blamed his law school  for his failure to  find a job, without giving due weight to the fact that sitting in a park whining about his plight wasn’t doing him any good either. Suddenly Ethics Alarms experienced an avalanche of indignant and often personally insulting comments introducing me to the strange world of the JD conspiracy theorists, who maintain that law schools engaged in an intentional conspiracy or “scam” to gull naive college grads into believing that a law degree was a sure-thing ticket to Easy Street and six-figure starting salaries.

In the Post’s report, we learn that other advanced degree-holders, namely PhDs in scientific fields, are also unable to find work or toiling in fields unrelated to their degrees. The Post says:

“Traditional academic jobs are scarcer than ever. Once a primary career path, only 14 percent of those with a PhD in biology and the life sciences now land a coveted academic position within five years, according to a 2009 NSF survey. That figure has been steadily declining since the 1970s, said Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University who studies the scientific workforce. The reason: The supply of scientists has grown far faster than the number of academic positions.”

Sounds a lot like the legal market to me! Continue reading →

Ethical and Unethical Adultery Advice: There is Carolyn Hax, and Then There Is Emily Yoffe

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Sometimes, you just have to tell your slimy boss “No.”

Emily Yoffe is Slate’s advice columnist, in its “Dear Prudence” feature. She specializes in extreme situations: a recent column involved a teenager who realized that his mother had breast-fed him far too long because she was sexually aroused by it, and then had him fondle her breasts for years after he stopped be willing to suck on them. He asked what he should do now that his mother was subjecting his younger sister to the same treatment. (Emily did get that one right: she told him to call child services on his mother, and to seek professional help for himself.)

Last week I congratulated Carolyn Hax for her advice to a woman torn between the adulterous relationship of one friend with another friend’s husband. Notwithstanding the persistent argument of one crusading commenter who felt that I should have stood for universal adultery whistleblowing on friends and strangers alike, Hax gave, as usual, practical, ethical and measured advice.  She suggested that the inquirer tell the cheating husband that his secret was out, and that she would not lie to protect his illicit affair.  I believe that’s the right ethical balance. Hax’s advice to the woman was to be proactive in both extracting herself from the split loyalties and to be a catalyst for either disclosure or ending the affair. I also noted that the ethical duty on the questioner may be different when the betrayed spouse is an especially close friend, or a family member. Then loyalty and trust could require disclosure.

That same week, Yoffe got an inquiry from a “well-paid assistant of a successful business mogul.” Among her duties, she told “Prudence,” is to facilitate her boss’s extra-marital affair: lying about his whereabouts to business associates, deceiving his wife when she calls, and even buying gifts for the illicit lover. “Next month he’s going on a weeklong business trip,” she wrote. “He only needs to be gone for two days, but he’s taking his girlfriend with him and staying longer. I know I’m doing wrong by his wife. But I love my job, and I’m not sure what I could or should do to behave honorably in this situation.” Continue reading →

The Ethics Of Getting Fired: Ann Curry’s Today Show Exit

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“We love you, Ann!” “I hate you, Matt!”

I was going to make Ann Curry’s method of leaving the Today Show’s anchor chair an Ethics Quiz, but decided that there weren’t sufficiently compelling arguments for more than one conclusion: her farewell drama yesterday morning was unprofessional, and in her job and her industry, but also many others, professional obligations trump candor.

I will admit up front that I never liked Ann Curry, either as a news reader nor as Matt Lauer’s partner after Meridith Viera left the show. Her open-faced demeanor, which made it crystal clear with every story and interview where her own sympathies lay, was the antithesis of objective and fair reporting, regardless of the steadily increasing number of similar practitioners, like CNN’s eye-rolling, squinting, smirking morning tag-team of Soledad O’Brien and Carol Costello. Thus it was no surprise that having received the gift of being able to have an on-air good-bye and the trust of her NBC bosses to handle her farewell properly, Curry chose instead to (or perhaps it is fairer to say “couldn’t control herself sufficiently not to..”) make it obvious to viewers that she had been dumped, that she was hurt and angry about it, and that she blamed Matt Lauer, her co-host, who was widely reported to have made her ouster a condition of his new contract. The emotions Curry was wearing on her sleeve were especially glaring while Lauer was making the traditional speech about how much Curry would be missed and ended by trying to give her a show-biz hug and kiss. Curry refused to look at Lauer while he was talking, and ducked his kiss, looking for all the world like she was hugging Jerry Sandusky or someone similarly appealing. As we say in the theater in such situations: “Nice cover, Ann!” Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Weeping Bus Monitor: A Half-Million Dollars For Incompetence”

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Some critical threads on posts here depress me, and there have been two examples recently. The first is the parade of out-of-work or underemployed lawyers of recent vintage who identify with the unemployed lawyer in the Occupy Wall Street throng of last fall whose response to job-hunting frustration was to give up, hand-letter a sign and blame his law school. These commenters take special umbrage at my hardly original observation that a law degree is good for pursuits other than practicing law, and continue to insist that the degree is suddenly a handicap, as two JDs run for President of the United States for the first time since Dewey challenged FDR in 1944.

The other thread, if less vociferous and bizarre, is even more depressing. These are the tender souls who believe that Karen Klein, the inert school bus monitor shown in a viral video weeping and cringing at the taunts of the 12-year-olds she was supposed to supervise, deserves anything but scorn for stealing taxpayer money and disgracing adulthood in front of impressionable youngsters. Maybe I’ve been reading the comments for two many days, but they seem to have a theme in common, which is the avoidance of personal responsibility and accountability for setbacks and failure, and the eager acceptance of victim status in order to avoid blame and attract sympathy.

Thus I was in the perfect mood to read this spunky post from dkatt, who scored the Comment of the Day on the essay, “The Weeping Bus Monitor: A Half-Million For Incompetence”: Continue reading →

The 77% Lie: Just Because a False Statistic Is Useful and Traditional Doesn’t Make It Less Unethical To Keep Using It.

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Sure, lie to us, Mr. President. As long as its for a good cause.

In 2000, CNN anchor Bernard Shaw used the statistic that “women are paid only 77 cents for every dollar men receive for the same work” in a question to Joe Lieberman during the Vice Presidential candidates debate, prompting me to turn or the TV and write a letter to CNN. The statistic had long been debunked as misleading and inaccurate for years by every objective observer who examined it. The unspoken assumption that figure is meant to convey is that this supposed gap reflects sexism in the workplace. It dates from the early days of NOW and the feminist push for the Equal Rights Amendment, an activist-concocted lie, like many of the global warming “facts” mouthed by Al Gore, designed to simplify a complex phenomenon into something unequivocally persuasive. For Shaw, a journalist, to repeat a false and misleading statistic as fact in a nationally televised debate was inexcusable, and irresponsible journalism.

Did I mention that this was in 2000?

The 77% stat is one of my two pet fake statistics (the other being the statement that 50% of all U.S. marriages end in divorce, used by culture warriors on both the left and right), and I have vowed not to let either pass without a red flag until I either drop dead or people stop lying. So I don’t care to hear, thank you, about how I’m picking on the President Obama when Mitt Romney has been using some misleading facts too. I know he has. But when a President of the United States whose supporters laud as a genius and scholar, and who pledged not to mislead the American people promotes his campaign with a widely publicized statistic that he has to know misinforms the public, I believe that’s alarming, insulting, and infuriating.  The fact that Democrats and feminists have been using the same lie for over three decades doesn’t make it less offensive, but more. Continue reading →

The Weeping Bus Monitor: A Half-Million Dollars For Incompetence

/ Jack Marshall / 106 Comments

Karen Klein is the 68- year-old bus monitor who is the unwilling star of a viral video (below) showing her being insulted and mocked by 12-year-olds on a school bus.

Continue reading →

Now THAT’S An Unethical Excuse!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“My dog ate my brother.”

There is misconduct that suggests that an individual’s normal ethics alarms malfunctioned. There is misconduct that indicates that an individual has no ethics alarms. (An aside: I have just about concluded that model/vicious tweeter Melissa Stetten is in this category. She’s really proud of herself for humiliating a doofus actor who was trying to impress her, judging from her narcissistic website, and accepting accolades from fans who appear to be just as ethically warped as she is. This makes her a fick.) Finally there is misconduct so irresponsible and completely devoid of its impact on others that it is convincing proof that nothing exists between the individual’s ears at all—a conscience, common sense, gray matter.

This is a tale of that last variety of misconduct. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Day: Jo-Ann Youngblood

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

“There is nothing wrong with being an average (mediocre) employee. Not everyone aspires to be in management. If the person meets the requirements of their current job, and they like the job and want to stay in the job, so be it. Stop trying to force people to get to the next level. The reality is that work is not the most important thing in everyone’s lives. People have more important things in their life than work. Work is simply a means to get the money we need to pay the mortgage and our other bills. Work is a low-priority event for most people. I’m only willing to do the bare minimum that it takes to get a paycheck every two weeks. As long as I am meeting the requirements of my job, than that is good enough. Don’t expect any more of me because I will not be a slave to any company.”

—-Commenter Jo-Ann Youngblood (of Tulsa, Oklahoma) in response to New York Times small business blogger Jay Golz’s 2011 post, “The Dirty Little Secret of Successful Companies,” in which he concluded that what dragged companies down were what he called “the sixes”—mediocre employees who just weren’t very good at their jobs.

George Costanza, hard at work.

Golz reprinted the comment today in a Times feature selecting highlights from the blog. I like Golz’s answer, which read in part:

“…As the owner of a business, I have the right to avoid hiring someone who only wants to do the bare minimum to get a paycheck. In fact, if I hire too many people with that attitude, I will be out of business. This is Capitalism 101, survival of the fittest. I operate in a very competitive market. I don’t have any patents, any special marketing magic, or any secret recipes. My companies can only exist and grow if they do a much-better-than-average job. Continue reading →