Publications
The Conflict Between Maintaining Work Standards
And Maintaining Legal Compliance
Chris Schultz was a 45-year old building maintenance technician employed in a hospital near Chicago. In 1999 he took FMLA leave to care for his mother, who suffered from heart disease and diabetes, and his father, who was battling Alzheimer's disease. After his mother died, Schultz continued to take intermittent FMLA leave to care for his father.
Schultz' propensity to take leave no doubt interfered with his work performance. Consequently, in the midst of his travail, hospital management imposed new monthly performance standards for workers in Schultz's department. Schultz claimed that the standards held him responsible for completing tasks that could only be finished if he took no FMLA leave. The hospital stuck to its guns, taking the position that workers had to at least meet minimum criteria. Ultimately, Schultz was terminated for failure to meet the standards.
Schultz sued the hospital and his managers for interfering with his FMLA rights, and for intentional infliction of emotional distress. A jury awarded him $750,000 in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages. His two supervisors were held individually liable, in the amount of $450,000 each.
How could this result have been avoided? The proposition that a worker has the responsibility to satisfy minimal performance criteria doubtlessly made perfect sense to the hospital's management. However, a trained manager would understand that when an employee is failing to meet those criteria because of the need to take the kind of leave the FMLA permits, a huge "red flag" goes up, and no action can be taken without a legal analysis. A trained manager would know enough to stop - whether or not it seems to make sense to do so - and have the legal significance of the hospital's next move carefully analyzed.
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