Best of luck getting through today without chomping your nails clean off. :\
I’m astounded that dragongirl has not been given details of the incident so she can defend herself. Is this common in America? Or is what she’s going through a pre-screening?
It’s not a legal proceeding–it’s a company’s internal investigation. Not a lawyer and I’m pretty much talking out of my ass right now, but I’m pretty sure that her employer can investigate any way they see fit, assuming they’re got an “employment at will” kind of thing going on. Now, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have to justify it after the fact if they fire her and try to claim it was for-cause so they don’t have to bite the unemployment bullet, but. :shrug:
I’ve seen it before and more than once.
From post #29, it appears that she found out the details during her interview regarding the incident in question.
First she needs to find out if she’s been fired. There hasn’t been a hearing, there hasn’t been anything.
Apparently the place she works has a policy to send home anyone accused of misconduct, until they are either cleared or fired. And it makes a sort of sense–you can’t have a guy raping patients, and someone complains, but he stays on the job free to rape at will until the investigation is complete.
So it’s probably not that they believed the co-worker, it’s that they have to go through their policy. I’ll admit a 4:25 appointment is kind of WTF though. But that’s better than a 5:25 appointment, which would mean they wanna fire her without the other employees seeing it happen.
ETA: Although if this is a residential unit none of the above applies, because they’ll have staff present continuously.
I work in the same field. I’m not sure how the rules are where you work, but with us, any accusation has to be taken seriously and investigated, mostly in hopes of keeping external agencies from swooping in.
A story that happened before I started working at this place: a certain client accused three staff of tying her down, cutting her into pieces and throwing those pieces down the storm drain. Obviously, if the allegations were true, the woman would not have been alive to make them. Yet, those three staff were pulled and sent home pending an investigation. All statements were documented… you get the idea.
If they don’t do it, the state (in our case) may find holes in the documentation, which may lead to a complete audit, which no one wants.
I guess what I’m saying is that its always possible that the ones leading the investigation know from the start that the accusations are false, but they are bound by the law to look into it anyway. I’m sending good thoughts in your direction, and hoping that when its all over, your supervisors can say they knew it was a frivolous from the beginning.
I had to meet with my director and the head of HR as well as the COO this afternoon. I am reinstated as manager at the group home again starting tomorrow. The charges were found to be unsubstantiated and I will get my back pay. However, they asked me to take an abuse and neglect class which I will be doing, due to “something the accuser thought she may have heard”.
I suppose that I should be happy about this, but I am not. Instead I’m depressed. I’ve been crying all week trying to figure out what I did that was so horrible, but still knowing that I didn’t do anything. The company’s policy of not giving me any support during any of this and not even telling me what I was accused of has left a very bad taste in my mouth.
The staff that made the accusation is one that I had to write up a few weeks ago for a repeated problem and I feel that she made this accusation to get even with me. In addition to that, I discovered that my assistant has taken my name off all of the email while I’ve been out and I feel very betrayed.
I do not know how to go back and try to resume things as normal again tomorrow. I’m not even sure I want to go back. This has put me behind on a lot of bills, it’s put me through horrible stress, I make an incredibly sad amount of money, I cannot afford medical benefits and I am on call 5 days a week and several times had to go back to assist in some problem without getting paid for it.
I hope that things go well at the interview I have next week and I am able to work elsewhere.
I hope so too.
I’m sorry you had to go through all that for nothing, except a lot of grief. It’s kind of sad when a disgruntled employee can cause you so much angst and heartache. Good luck on your interview.
Probably the best outcome one could reasonably expect.
Even so, it is not a fun thing to go through, and your feelings about the whole thing are pretty darn appropriate.
Best of luck in your searches, I hope you find something more remunerative and less stressful.
I’m glad the outcome reflected your good performance. It is terrible you had to go through that.
It’s possible that your assistant removing your name from emails was acting under instructions from someone higher up, so that’s not necessarily his/her fault.
Anyhow, I’m glad you’re back, although it’s not ever going to be the same again there.
Can you start any sort of disciplinary action against the employee who accused you, since it was obviously unsubstantiated and possibly retaliatory?
I can’t think of anything that could possibly look worse in this situation than what could easily appear to be retaliatory discipline, especially with the inevitable spin the employee will be putting on it. If dragongirl is job-searching, it’s probably better to put the whole thing behind her and work for the (hopefully) limited time she has left there as if it hadn’t happened.
A very bad idea, because the accuser has EEO protection from retaliation.
I’m talking about **if **the accusations were clearly fabricated. Surely the company would have policies in place to discourage this kind of thing, or employees could constantly make unsubstantiated accusations against anyone they didn’t like with zero consequences.
If I were dragongirl, if the shenanigans were obvious, I would still let the higher-ups than her take care of discipline. There’s really a “Caesar’s wife” kind of thing now, since she has already been accused (falsely or not) of unethical (or illegal) behavior. The fact that she was cleared doesn’t, unfortunately, set the meter back to “0”.
Are you salaried?
Oh yeah, definitely I don’t mean that she should take disciplinary action–what I meant was, have a conversation with her manager along the lines of, “I hate to be suspicious, but this accusation came from Person X right after I had to discipline her, and not only did it make my personal life very hard because my income was suspended, but even worse it has impacted my reputation here at work.” Just get the ball rolling, so to speak. Of course, the efficacy and advisability of such a conversation is going to depend greatly on the kind of manager you have.
EEO regulations always assume the accuser was acting in good faith; a malicious accusation is not considered. You NEVER retaliate, and if you do have take an adverse job action after an accusation, you better have several reams of documentation to back you to fend off a greivance for retaliation.