There’s a reason computers have admin accounts that can reset passwords.
A employer shouldn’t rely on employees to provide passwords. Files should be backed up incrementaly every day. Just in case the hard drive goes bad or is tampered with.
However, I would suggest that the OP should provide the former boss with passwords and information on resetting the alarm. You really don’t want to burn bridges. Don’t make an enemy within the industry where you still work.
Yeah, that’s just nuts that the employer had to ask. That being said, the password i use for my employment stuff has no value to me once i leave (and lose access to that stuff, which is my employer’s.) So if they asked me, I’d tell them. And then I’d tell all my friends about the incompetence of my employer for having to ask.
I have the occasional personal email on my employer’s system, despite trying to keep most of my correspondence on my own devices. But nothing that would get me in trouble if my boss or IT or HR or legal read it. Nothing that would be embarrassing if it somehow got out.
Preschool teacher here (yeah, since CTS forced me to retire from interpreting-- I still hang out with Deaf people a lot, though).
Anyway, a half-decent daycare is not going to hand over a kid to someone who says she is the mother’s office manager; a really good one is going to ask for ID, take a picture, and have a security person wait with the office manager while the parent is contacted to make sure this person is not, say, the sister of the ex in a nasty custody battle. Or a registered sex offender who just moved into the neighborhood.
I’ve checked ID of actual parents just because I didn’t know them by sight-- and been THANKED by them.
If the boss goes off on the daycare for not handing the kid over, like she goes off on the office manager, she will be without childcare pretty fast-- and probably expect the office manager to babysit.
Good situation to be out of. Hope the previous owner of the business will provide a reference.
Yeah, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor at the boss’s inappropriate “request”. Then I was picturing her frantically trying to find a friend to pick up her kid. Oops, not too many who she hasn’t treated like crap in the past, so then she had to try family members, and finally guilted a sister-in-law into running over as they were about to lock the doors. Annnd…of course they’re not releasing the child to someone they don’t know. And probably someone the kid’s never met, either.
The day care was an in home type. A phone call from her boss saying so and so would be picking her up and the girl (8 years old) recognizing my wife would have been acceptable.
Oh I think the “burning bridges” ship sailed a long time ago for the OP’s wife. Not that she did anything wrong, but I wouldn’t expect her ex employer to say anything positive about her because she sounds like a spiteful lunatic.
As for the passwords and whatnot, as satisfying as it might be to simply “forget” them and let her old employer stew, the best course of action is probably just send them in an email (containing a link to a public site where anyone can find them…just kidding). Those systems ultimately belong to the employer so best not have it coloring any potential legal discussions you or they might initiate later on.
Although I might indicate it may take me a bit to find them, but I should have them about the same time I receive my final paycheck.
That’s not completely true. Maybe if you have a job that almost any human on the planet can do. But even then, it’s hard to find good reliable people. Maybe idiots like the OP’s boss can get away with treating people like that for awhile. But I would imagine at some point soon, that boss will have a hard time finding competent people who will put up with that bullshit,
Yeah. We never send anything embarrassing. But it’s bad form. And confusing.
But your right, years ago a member of the public requested all emails between the Sherriff and a Commissioner. Took us days of going through backups to do it. That changed our policy on how long we keep emails.
While I agree that at-will employment does result in advantages to the employer the employee does not have it does save the employee from being compelled to work for the employer and to exercise choice. As we saw from the OP, even after the OP’s wife was fired the employer still, apparently, though she could order her former employee to return to work. She can’t. Likewise, your employer can’t prevent you from seeking other work (although if they find out they might decide to fire you).
You don’t realize how valuable being able to say “I quit” and leave a toxic situation is until you’re in such a situation.
For some (obviously not all) employers this can moderate how they treat their employees because if they don’t meet some modest standards all their employees might walk out the door, which is bad for the business. My local area recently had a small coffee shop go under for that very reason - everyone kept quitting until there were no more people to staff the place (and my employer gained a couple of their employees, whom we are happy to have. And their happy because their wages are doubled and they have benefits now).
I don’t know - most being able to even get into the place without setting off the alarm and attracting the police, unable to get into the safe, unable to get into computer systems is actually pretty steep. It’s a bit of an edge case, and most owners/employers aren’t quite so epically stupid about such matters, but firing the office manager very much did have consequences for this woman. Hence the attempt to order the fired employee back to work. The dummy might lose her business with no one with brain cells to run the place.
But yes, in most cases one employee quitting does cause much impact to the business (often there is some, but it’s easily mitigated).
Too many people think of the computer they use at work as “their” computer. It’s not. It’s the company’s computer which they allow you to use to do your job. You don’t own it. Don’t do or put anything on it or through it you’d be ashamed to have published by the news media, or that it going public would jeopardize your privacy.
That’s the very reason that the HR department at my company only sends communications regarding your benefits or a leave of absence to your personal e-mail (I have a medical leave coming up, in fact, and it’s all being communicated over my personal e-mail). It’s to comply with HIPAA and maintain employee privacy. My current employer is not perfect, of course, but it does a good job of keeping confidential stuff confidential and all levels.
My employer has quite a few positions of the “almost any human can do” type. Finding people who will show up on time in a reliable manner is one of the biggest problems my employer faces.
At a certain point you run out of people you can treat like dirt. I’ve seen a half dozen businesses crash and burn and disappear because the boss didn’t grasp that fact.
Although legally your wife might owe her ex-boss those passwords, nobody says she has to provide them with any speed.
+1 on consulting an attorney, who can advise on HOW to be strategic about things like passwords.
In the 20-20 hindsight category, any boss who requires their administrative employees to do personal-valet service and then ignores appropriate and stated boundaries is a lost cause.
Combinations and passwords are the intellectual property of the business and an employee has an ethical responsibility to hand them over.
That is true NOW, but the USA (and Canada, where I live) are currently in a labor shortage of a sort not seen in peacetime since the 19th century. The leverage employees have now is quite unusual and is the product of a fairly recent confluence of events unlikely to be sustained or repeated.
99% of the time employers and employees are not remotely on equal footing.
Probably not an important distinction, but I believe @What_Exit. They have every right to access the account, but not to know the specific combination of characters you chose as a password.
That’s a distinction without a difference. If the employer actually wanted to take this matter to court I have no confidence at all the courts will agree with this thin slicing.
The problem is that clueless managers don’t have any ideas of which employees have critical information and skills and which don’t. A burger flipper quits, no problem. But my daughter used to work at a budget airline in Hong Kong. After she left they decided to get rid of the non-Chinese employees. Mostly not critical, but one was in charge of renewing a license they needed to run their website on a US server. Their web site went down, just when people were going to book golden week travel. Oops.
Money savings mean that companies are doing more with fewer people, and there is a lack of redundancy and backup. Who has the time to learn someone else’s job? So the risk is higher.
Honestly, I think that’s a very interesting legal question and I’m curious how that would play out.
I’m guessing this would be a civil matter, where the company is claiming damages caused by the employee. (I’m not a lawyer but I’ve never heard of a law requiring a person disclose a password.)
I imagine it would depend on state and local laws, but even if it’s an “in home” daycare provider, if they’re licensed by the state to be in the daycare business, they are likely still on the hook to follow rules regarding to whom they release a child.
OTOH, if it’s simply a “provider” who’s acting as a babysitter for a client or two, and isn’t licensed, that is probably another kettle of fish.
I’d be very surprised if it was required to supply a password to a personal company account. They are entitled to access the account of course but your password is your own. What if you used a password app and had it stored there and then you deleted it from the app and don’t know it. You can’t be expected to save the password of a former employer.
My former employer required that we change passwords every 45 days.
If I had changed my password a day or two before I was terminated, there’s a decent chance that I wouldn’t remember it a week later.
But as been noted, somebody in the organization with administrative rights had access to all my stuff, so IMO the question is moot.
Doing some random googling… I think a small daycare provider would likely be able to release a child to a new person if
A big firm would likely need advance written notice that “Joe Smith can pick up my kids”, but i suspect a family provider, even one that’s licensed, would be okay with the combination of a phone call from the number they expected, with parent’s voice they recognized, plus a signed letter from the parent that might come with Joe.