Reason Prevails ... and Reason Flails ...
Summer 2010

REASON PREVAILS...

Well, why not? Everything else is covered by the FMLA! A federal court in Massachusetts has dismissed a lawsuit under the Family and Medical Leave Act brought by a woman who accompanied her sick husband on a seven-week trip to their native Philippines, where they visited a Catholic priest in the hope of finding a miracle cure. One problem was that the priest, with all due respect, was clearly not a “health care provider” within the meaning of the FMLA. The other problem was that the woman and her husband spent approximately half of their trip visiting relatives and engaging in other social activities.

EEOC owned in sex harassment “class” case. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was hit with a $4.5 million attorneys’ fee award in the Northern District of Iowa. The EEOC had sued trucking company CRST, alleging that approximately 270 women had been sexually harassed. The judge attacked the EEOC’s “sue first and ask questions later” strategy. In a nutshell, the court had earlier dismissed or granted summary judgment with respect to almost all of the women, leaving 67 alleged victims. Then, the judge dismissed the claims against the remaining women because the EEOC had not investigated their claims and had not engaged in the conciliation process. Although CRST did not get all of the $7.6 million it sought, this was still an impressive victory for the company.

AND REASON FLAILS...

Oh, that's bad. No, that's good. A New York City police detective held his colleague’s gun while the colleague interviewed a suspect. Because the detective’s holster already held his own gun, he put the colleague’s gun, pointed down, in the waistband of his pants. While still holding the gun, he leaned back in his chair, and allegedly because the chair was broken, it unexpectedly “swiveled back” too far, causing the detective to lose his balance and accidentally pull the trigger. His first bit of good luck was that he shot himself only in the knee. His second bit of good luck was that he won a verdict of approximately $4.5 million from the police department because of the allegedly defective chair. He took disability retirement at age 49 at three quarters of his salary while continuing to work as a sheriff’s deputy in South Carolina (no doubt Kiawah Island, Isle of Palms, or Myrtle Beach). The NYPD plans to appeal the $4.5 million verdict.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead. It has now been a year since the EEOC issued its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking interpreting the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, which took effect in November 2009. Although the EEOC promised a final rule before the effective date of the GINA, we are still waiting.

But he did correctly predict that people in 2010 would colonize Mars, wear silver jumpsuits and drive flying saucers to work. Newsweek’s website has posted a column written in 1995 “debunking” the predictions that this new-fangled “internet” would change the world. We know that poor Clifford Stoll must be cringing today at “The Internet? Bah!,” but we can’t resist a chuckle: “Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries, and multimedia classrooms.” Yep. “They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities.” Yep. “Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems.” Yep. “Baloney.” Uhh . . . never mind.