I have met him personally on several occassions. He might be downplaying rudeness in the email and overplaying how his company responded but the facts of the event are probably accurate.
Was it like: “Donuts? You don’t need no stinking donuts!”
or perhaps like: “No donuts for you!” (snatchs donut from his hand)
I’d say it’s impossible to say if the email writer was wronged without knowing what the email said.
“I went through your drive-through and some wetback who should go back to Mexico 'cuz she’s she’s too dumb to learn English so she fubar’d my order and couldn’t even figure out how to give me the right donut”
is a whole lot different from
“I went through your drive-through early this morning and was disappointed and annoyed that the only employee on staff at the time did not understand enough English to take my order. Not only could I not get the right donut, the extra time it took to communicate a simple request made me late for work. I would hope that in the future Donut Corp. could be sure to provide enough staff with the appropriate skills to be able to handle what is required for the normal range of business, or at least to provide supervisory staff for them to get help from when there is a problem. Sincerely, John Smith.”
The second email, although it should not have been sent on the company’s network, is nothing for anyone to shout “racism!” at. It’s a reasonable complaint. The first is not.
I realize that without specifics that some people are getting hung up, but really do the specifics matter in this case? The question is whether one has an expectation of privacy when contracting someone about a customer service issue. To me, the actualy text is irrelevant just as how in other cases where there is an expectation of privacy it doesn’t much matter what is spilled as much as the spilling occured.
Maybe?
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The company’s mail is the company’s mail. There is no privacy if you signed it away when you were hired.
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Particularly if the guy is not the greatest worker/person in the company, regardless of whether he actually dun wrong, there’s no compelling reason for the company to protect him and risk encurring the wrath of the doughnut company.
Why would you have any expectation of privacy from contacting a company? Your doctor, yes. Your lawyer, yes. Donut company, not so much.
I am a little confused. People have an expectation of privacy with their doctor, their lawyer, and their priest. Why does anyone think that they have an expectation of privacy with their local donut shop? Does the guy who makes the bear claws and the lady who fills the cream donuts have to attend 12 hrs. of HIPAA training each FY? Does the guy in charge of kolaches and fritters have to maintain their Security, Policy and Procedures Regs binder? C’mon now, they make pastries and desserts for goodness sakes. 
If you write a company a nasty letter from work, you take your chances, who knows what they are going to do with it.
If the email was sent from the company’s email system, you have zero expectation of privacy.
If the email was sent entirely separate from the company but gave the appearance of being from the company, or if the sender implied that the weight of the company was behind his sentiments (such as by sending a personal complaint on company letterhead), then he should expect that he has waived privacy relative to the company on this matter, and the company should have rights of knowledge to any further dealings based on his email/letter.
If the email was sent entirely separately and there was no mention whatsoever of the company, and there is no reasonable way that Donut Corp. could know where he worked, then my opinion is that his complaint should usually have no relation at all to his employer and any response from Donut Corp. should not have been made to his HR director. But in that case, they wouldn’t know who his HR director was. If for some reason they did, such as the clerk just happened to know where they guy worked, Donut Corp. still should not have contacted the HR director unless, perhaps, Employee’s job somehow directly relates to the complaint.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
No.
One has an expectation of privacy in things one takes steps to ensure remain private. By sending an email to complain about his treatment at the donut shop, your friend had no expectation of privacy. To the contrary; he expected the donut shop to investigate, take action, and respond to his complaint. The fact that he does not like the results of said investigation, said action, and said response notwithstanding, the donut shop did precisely what a rational person would have expected them to do upon receipt of a complaint that, according to both the donut shop and your friend’s employer, was inappropriate.
IAAL, not yours, and probably not licensed in your jurisdiction. If you think that was legal advice, you’ve got problems, because it isn’t. It’s just plain common sense.
You might want to rethink this logic. Just because you don’t know his reason to lie doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one.
Personal remark:
Unless this guy’s email to DonutCorp was wholly, utterly and inarguably offensive, abusive and racist, DonutCorp is utterly foolhardy to risk potential legal consequences from contacting ComplainerDude’s employer.
If there’s no compelling written evidence of ComplainerDude’s alleged racism, it comes down to “he said she said” which no one wishes to rely on in court.
There are two explanations for this situation I can see that make any sense.
- DonutCorp is run by persons with poor judgement.
- ComplainerDude really did write a patently racist, offensive and abusive email.
And, in passing, OMFG, who writes complaint letters from their company email?
My employer is so image-conscious they’d fire me down off the roof if I even thought about that.
obligatory: “band name”. Maybe alt.country? 
E-mail sent from my company account has an automatic boilerplate on it “If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail” etc.
IMHO, Wronged Donut Buyer should not have sent his complaint from his company account. I think he has some future grievance with the donut company, for involving his employer in what was a personal complaint, but company e-mail is for company use only.
Am I the only one who finds the donut Co’s actions bewildering?
Assuming any sort of e-mail from a customer, angry and off-kilter or calm and collected, under what circumstances do you figure out the guy’s employer’s number and get them to reprimand him? I mean, what a convoluted way to deal with it. It could only make any kind of sense if, as some have suggested, the sender had suggested that it was the company he worked for had endorsed his e-mail, but that is just too ridiculous for words.
Forgetting the guy’s right to privacy (it’s still not clear in any way that he used company e-mail), what was going on on the other end that made their actions make sense. Do they go and try to ‘get’ folks who complain? Teach them a lesson or something? This is a really bizarre story.
What’s hard to figure out about the employer’s number? It’s a 2-second google search. It might even be in the email in the signature.
I don’t think it’s all that strange to inform a company that their employees are using their company-provided services to send hate mail. (Not saying the OP’s was hate mail; just if.)
Seems like the original question has been answered but . . .
An ultimate defense to slander (or libel) is truth. That is, if you write an email to me saying that you slept with Janet Reno and her pet clydesdale named Jimmy, and then I go out and tell people that you sent me an email that said you slept with Janet Reno and her pet clydesdale named Jimmy, you would be unsuccessful in a slander/libel lawsuit as long as I could prove you sent the email.
So, if the donut company told this guy’s employer “Joe Smith wrote this email to us and it says X,” they’re in the clear (as far as slander goes). On the other hand, if the guy wrote a polite complaint and the donut company told this guy’s company “Joe Smith hates hispanics and wants all to go back where they came from,” he might have a case.
I think. IANAL either, but I’m involved in journalism…it comes up.
If the company had intercepted the email, found it to be inappropriate, and punished the writer, then you are correct. There is no expectation of privacy within the company.
But in this case the donut company violated privacy. I think you can argue forwarding mail to the store manager was appropriate, since the store manager would be the person to take corrective action.
The store manager’s action of calling HR was totally inappropriate. If he thought the email racist, he could have responded as such (politely) to the writer. Or he could have ignored it. Responding to the writer’s employer was just wrong, and might well expose Donut Co. to a suit. (IANAL also.) If I was this guy’s manager, he’d be out on his ass in a second. This is not how any business should respond to a customer complaint.
Speculation: I wonder if the manager was sensitive on this issue, or has a relationship with the employee being complained about. I can’t think of any other reason to do such a stupid thing.
I apologize if i’m missing something… but except for the OP’s summary of his opinion, i don’t see anything implying anything about the email (if it was rude, actually racist, polite, etc…) or where he sent it from…
Was this information in the original yahoo group posting?
It doesn’t say it was sent on the company network or that the writer ever mentioned his employer. But if it wasn’t and he didn’t, then how did they know who his employer was?
I disagree, IF the email was sent under the complainer’s employer’s name. IF he sent it under his company’s name and IF it was actually racist or hate mail, then the recipient has the right - an obligation, even - to inform the company that its employees are using their name to send racist hate mail. (IF the complainer’s email was racist; we don’t know that it actually was.)
I will say again that if I received racist mail on company email or letterhead, I’d be faxing it to the CEO in a new york minute and inquiring if he knew what his employees were doing on company time.
In post #18 the OP states that the email in question was ‘apparently’ sent from the company email.
Email is far different from letterhead, which represents an official mailing from a company. A blatantly racist message, perhaps, so I agree with you. I doubt this was, since the poster mentioned by the OP is unlikely to not be embarassed by something that blatant. An email purporting to be officially from the company, also okay. Just a message using the domain of the company is not commonly thought to be official company business, or the official opinion of a company.
A less inflammatory version of this is a standards activity. IEEE standards are done by people representing themselves, not their companies, but mail always comes from company email domains.
Notice that the corporate hq, where the mail was originally sent, did not seem to consider the mail racist, as far as we can tell. If they had responded to the sending company I might see it. But they went through normal channels. I really can’t imaging any resolution center forwarding a piece of hate mail to the local manager. That would probably be an HR offense - and rightfully so.
I certainly agree that the sender of this mail should have used a private account. That was dumb. The response was worse.