No matter how bad your boss is do not, I repeat, DO NOT poison her tea.

Unfortunately my advice is too late for two North Carolina cafeteria workers who were charged with poisoning their bosses tea last month. The workers, 64 year old Eileen Hallamore and 38 year old Angela Johnson, attempted to poison their boss, the cafeteria manager, by putting a foreign substance in her tea.

This isn’t the first case of angry employees opting to go the “poison” route. In London a 33 year old nanny is serving a year in prison after poisoning her boss, and in India, a scientist who had a longstanding beef with a senior scientist is accused of mixing mercuric chloride in glass of water.

I’ve worked in at least two places where a colleague announces her pregnancy only to have a cold silence fall over management. They’d never be brazen enough to admit it, but some managers find pregnancy an annoyance and resent the employee for “disrupting” the workflow by getting pregnant. The U.S. already has one of the shortest maternity leave policies in the western world. Add to it the disdain of management, and pregnant women in the workforce may start to feel a little less than appreciated.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and made discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions illegal. Title VII, covers employers with 15 or more employees and includes state and local governments. Here’

Title VII’s pregnancy-related protections include:

• Hiring

  An employer cannot refuse to hire a pregnant woman because of her pregnancy, because of a pregnancy-related condition, or because of the prejudices of co-workers, clients, or customers.

• Pregnancy & Maternity Leave

  An employer may not single out pregnancy-related conditions for special procedures to determine an employee’s ability to work.

  If an employee is temporarily unable to perform her job because of her pregnancy, the employer must treat her the same as any other temporarily disabled employee.

• Pregnant employees must be permitted to work as long as they are able to perform their jobs. If an employee has been absent from work as a result of a pregnancy-related condition and recovers, her employer may not require her to remain on leave until the baby’s birth.
• Health Insurance

  Any health insurance provided by an employer must cover expenses for pregnancy-related conditions on the same basis as costs for other medical conditions. An employer need not provide health insurance for expenses arising from abortion, except where the life of the mother is endangered.

  Pregnancy-related expenses should be reimbursed exactly as those incurred for other medical conditions, whether payment is on a fixed basis or a percentage of reasonable-and-customary-charge basis.

  The amounts payable by the insurance provider can be limited only to the same extent as amounts payable for other conditions. No additional, increased, or larger deductible can be imposed.

  Employers must provide the same level of health benefits for spouses of male employees as they do for spouses of female employees.

• Fringe Benefits

  Pregnancy-related benefits cannot be limited to married employees. In an all-female workforce or job classification, benefits must be provided for pregnancy-related conditions if benefits are provided for other medical conditions.

  If an employer provides any benefits to workers on leave, the employer must provide the same benefits for those on leave for pregnancy-related conditions.

  Employees on leave because of pregnancy-related conditions must be treated the same as other temporarily disabled employees for accrual and crediting of seniority, vacation calculation, pay increases, and temporary disability benefits.

It is also unlawful to retaliate against an individual for opposing employment practices that discriminate based on pregnancy or for filing a discrimination charge, testifying, or participating in any way in an investigation, proceeding, or litigation under Title VII.

The bottom line – Women who are pregnant or affected by pregnancy-related conditions must be treated in the same manner as other applicants or employees with similar abilities or limitations.  For more information on EEOC polices, visit the EEOC’s website.

on Facebook anyway… sort of. Remember the employee who got fired for dissing her supervisor on Facebook? Well the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) sued American Medical Response of Connecticut, claiming that the company’s blogging and internet policy barring workers from disparaging the company or its supervisors was unconstitutional.

Well American Medical settled with the labor board and has agreed to change its blogging and internet policy. The company also agreed to revise another policy that prohibited employees from depicting the company over the Internet without permission.

Jonathan Kreisber, NLRB’s regional director says “The fact that they agreed to revise their rules so that they’re not so overly restrictive of the rights of employees to discuss their terms and conditions with others and with their fellow employees is the most significant thing that comes out of this.”

Back in 2009 the employee who spawned this debate posted comments on Facebook from her home computer after her supervisor said a customer had complained about her work. The comment, which apparently included a few of our most loved four letter words, was well received by colleagues. The employee in question was later fired. American Medical claimed they fired the employee because of poor performance, but the settlement seems to suggest otherwise.

What are your thoughts on Facebook posts about employees and bosses? Protected speech or “enter at your own risk?” Share your thoughts in the comment section.

That would be Chris Lee. NY Congressman Chris Lee.  Chris “striking the Eddie Long pose” Lee. Here’s a side by side if you think I’ve gone too far…

What is it about grown a** men who should be busy doing congressy things and running mega-churches, deciding instead to take cell phone pictures in bathrooms and sending them to people who are not their wives? Side question – Isn’t there something in the bible about pastors NEVER wearing muscle shirts. Ever. In fact, I think “though shalt never wear muscle shirts. Ever.” might have been one of the original commandments.

So, because of the picture on the left, and because he used his real name and real email address, Congressman Chris Lee is now former Congressman Chris Lee.  The woman he tried to impress on Craigslist checked him out on Facebook and learned that he was not, as he’d stated in his Craigslist profile, a 39-year-old divorced, lobbyist, but instead a 46-year-old married father.

To quote the woman who was on the receiving end of Lee’s lovely picture, “People cheat every day, but only dumb people get caught.”

Read more about Chris Lee and his failed foray into Craigslist here.

In what’s being reported as the first case in Mexico in which a judge is accused of sexual harassment Mexico City Judge Alfredo Reyes Flores has allegedly been spending an awful lot of his time on the job viewing pornography, including child pornography, consuming alcohol and sexually harassing female subordinates. He also apparently demanded bottles of wine from employees in exchange for authorizing time off and overtime.

Reyes Flores’ illicit activities were discovered during a “surprise inspection”.  This is the first case in Mexico in which a judge stands accused of sexual harassment and abuse of authority against his subordinates, according to sources at that court.

Read more at Sify news.

Yahoo Finance has a list of five things your boss won’t tell you. There list includes the fact that they’re probably reading your emails and that they couldn’t care less what current strain of bacteria is ravaging your child’s stomach and therefore don’t want to hear about why you’ve got to leave early to pick him up from daycare (my words not Yahoos.) Read the entire list here.

I’ve decided to add to the list of things your boss knows but will probably never tell you. Here are just a few…

• “Please take this recent college grad and teach her everything you know so that in six months I can get rid of you and pay her half your salary.”
• “When you come into my office and I look up bleary-eyed, it’s because I’ve been playing Solitaire for the past two hours.”
• “If it comes down to you or me, you’re outta here.”
• “I know you can do my job better than I can.”
• “I forgot to take my meds this morning.”

What secrets does your boss think she’s keeping?

While four inches of snow is child’s play for northerners, the southeast, unaccustomed to more than a mere dusting, is paralyzed as a result of a winter storm that crept in overnight.

Despite dire news warnings about hazardous driving conditions, I wonder how many non-essential (anyone who isn’t a doctor, nurse, cop, fire etc.) employees felt obligated to get to work today, not because the world would end if they didn’t show up, but because of an overly demanding boss or the fear of job loss.

I’ve been there more times than I’d like to count. One particularly challenging winter in the northeast with a blizzard threatening, employees congregated around water coolers wondering who would be bold enough to make the first move. Driving home in blizzard conditions is frightening and all of us wanted to beat the storm home. The bosses, who presumably would have to drive home in the same conditions, never budged, and at 5:00pm we ventured out into madness. Thank God all of us made it home alive but not everyone is always that fortunate.

A friend shared a story of a colleague who, fearful of driving to work in hazardous conditions, called her boss to tell her she wouldn’t be able to make it in.  Her boss gave her an ultimatum – report to work or you’re fired. My friends colleague took the warning seriously and unfortunately lost her life driving to work that morning. Read the rest of this entry »