Techdirt. Stories filed under "firing"

Big Banks Finally Punishing Employees For Fraud... Like The Call Center Guy Who Used A Fake Dime 50 Years Ago

Mike Masnick — Wed, 5 Sep 2012 09:19:00 PDT

Wells Fargo, of course, was one of a bunch of the big banks heavily involved in questionable activities that brought the world to the precarious economic conditions we're still living in today. Just a few weeks ago, the company settled charges that it had misled cities and non-profits when selling them risky securities without disclosing the risks. The company gets a slap on the wrist -- without having to admit guilt -- and one executive (again without admitting guilt) gets a six month suspension. Have you heard about any top execs at any of the banks getting fired for financial malfeasance? No? Well, perhaps it's because they're focusing on the real trouble makers. Like Richard Eggers. 49 years ago, Eggers, as a teenager, tried to stick a cardboard cutout of a dime into a washing machine. He didn't get away with it at the time, and was arrested for fraud. He somehow put his life back together and, until recently, was a phone customer service agent for Wells Fargo.

And now he's really paying the piper: Wells Fargo has just fired him for the decades-old incident that, again, involved a dime. Even accounting for inflation, we're talking about a dime. However, thanks to supposedly "tough" new regulations concerning financial institutions, barring them from employing execs convicted of fraud, Wells Fargo is claiming that it had to fire Eggers.

“We don’t have discretion to grant exceptions in situations like this. Once we find out someone has a criminal history of dishonesty or breach of trust we can no longer employ them.”

Eggers has responded by filing a civil rights complaint against the company and federal regulators. He and his lawyers are hoping to turn it into a class action lawsuit, as apparently a number of other employees at banks have lost their jobs under these rules. Actual execs responsible for the financial crisis? Not so much.

This is yet another case where laws like this must "sound good at the time" to the policy makers putting them together without any sense of who it will really impact. And the end result is that we sure are making Mr. Eggers "pay" for that dime stunt in 1963, huh?

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Doing A Google Search For 'Blonde' A Firable Offense For High School Teacher

Mike Masnick — Tue, 17 May 2011 10:39:00 PDT

After just talking about how organized workers can't easily be fired for bitching about their bosses on social media, we have a different employment case that shows how easy it is to potentially find some other reason to fire someone. In this case, a court upheld the firing of a school teacher, because he did a Google Image search on the word "blonde," which the school insists is a violation of its computer usage policy.

The teacher, who was the head of his union, contends that this was just an excuse to fire him over his union activities at a time when labor/management relations at the school were not going well. The court, however, has no problem with the firing, insisting that doing that search was a violation and thus he was fired for reasons that had nothing to do with protected collective activity. While I can understand where the ruling comes from, at some point, it doesn't seem to pass the common sense test. The "infraction" here seems minor. He didn't even click on any of the images he found. Everyone agrees that he spent a grand total of 67 seconds looking at the thumbnails on Google's results. It may have been against policy. It may have been stupid to do that at a school... but firing the guy for it seems to go beyond what would likely happen to another teacher in that situation.

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Google Employee Leaks The News That Google Fired Employee Who Leaked Salary Info

Mike Masnick — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 02:37:45 PST

Google made some news this week for giving all employees a 10% raise and an additional $1,000 bonus. An email was sent to all 25,000 employees announcing this. This is the kind of thing that is bound to leak. It's silly to pretend it won't. But... apparently Google quickly fired the leaker (though, you have to imagine more than one person leaked this). How do we know that the leaker was fired? You guessed it! Another employee leaked it. So now will that person get fired as well, and will we have another leak about the firing of the leaker over the firing of the leaker? Frankly, firing the original leaker seems like overkill. I understand why Google thought it should do that, but really, whoever leaked the email was probably doing it to spread the news about something cool that Google was doing for employees. It seems kinda short-sighted to then fire that person.

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Best Buy Firing Employee Because He Makes A Funny Video That Doesn't Even Mention Best Buy

Mike Masnick — Fri, 2 Jul 2010 10:56:19 PDT

There's an amusing text-to-speech animated video making the rounds (I've been sent it half a dozen times already) mocking iPhone-obsessed buyers going into stores and not caring that phones like the HTC Evo might have better specs, because they just "want an iPhone." It's amusing (though, probably not safe for work from an audio standpoint -- so wear headphones, or work with cool people): Well over a million people have seen it. It's definitely gone viral. But that, of course, doesn't make it a story worth mentioning here.

What does is Best Buy's incredible stupidity about the video. Wait, you might ask, what does the video have to do with Best Buy? In the video the store is called "Phone Mart," and there's no mention of Best Buy at all. There's absolutely nothing about the video that would have you thinking about Best Buy. Until now.

Andrew F points us to the news that the creator of the video actually works at Best Buy -- even though pretty much everyone who watched the video had no idea. And now, Best Buy upper management was so afraid that Apple/AT&T might get upset at the idea that Best Buy was mocking the iPhone that it suspended the guy who made it and are in the process of firing him. Yes, despite the fact that no one was associating this video with Best Buy, Best Buy decided to do the one and only thing that would suddenly associate this video with Best Buy in a way that is not, at all, flattering to Best Buy. If it was afraid of how this video would look for Best Buy, it probably should have considered how much worse firing the guy who made it looks.

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