What She Said, What He Said: Choose Your Words Very Carefully
This recent court decision contains several lessons, including:
1. Choose your words very, very carefully;
2. Realize that the implications of inaction in dealing with a harassment complaint can easily come back to haunt you; and
3. Continued updated training in harassment is probably necessary in today’s world.
In this race and sex discrimination case (Kelly v. LEX Inc., F.3d Supp. (S.D.N.Y. 2004)), a white female employee referred to a black male employee as a “young buck,” he made what another woman interpreted as a sexually threatening statement… and the court ruled that
despite everything being more or less equal, it was not necessarily racially or sexually discriminatory that he was fired and she was not even disciplined. The court sent the case to trial on this issue.
Read here for the rest of the story….
What I see as the most interesting lesson is the company’s extreme overreaction to a single offensive remark.
(Disclaimer: this is not legal advice, but . . .) You DO NOT have to FIRE a good employee for a first offense of verbally harassing conduct, period.
And if the person you fired is within a protected class (racial minority, over 40, foreign-born, etc.) you can bet they’ll bring a charge and look for comparables not in their protected class who were treated more leniently for similar conduct.
So, before you fire them, are you confident they won’t find such instances? Are you sure it’s not worth trying less extreme corrective action?