Ditto. Charger, seriously consider turning all this over to a board-certified employment law atty/litigator in your area. If your dumb-ass boss was put on notice and STILL did nothing, then take it to court. Recover your losses and move on.
Sadly, some employers “take notice” of serious workplace problems only when hauled into court.
Not really. I am an HR person and I really don’t see any employment laws being broken here (I only read this thread and the OP of the earlier thread. If something nasty is elsewhere, my apologies). If the threat “I’ll kill ya” was made, bringing it to the attention of the police was appropriate. However, it sounds like **Charger ** didn’t follow through with that, and didn’t mention that incident to the boss.
Don’t get me wrong, the coworker does sound like a complete jerk, but the kind of thing that leads to a lawsuit is when you rigorously share the documentation with management at every incident. HR (which I realize this company doesn’t have) is typically very aggressive at telling management they need to respond to what has been brought to their attention, especially if it violates any employment laws, which I still don’t see here. The US really doesn’t have laws against bullying in the workplace. Our employment laws are mainly about discrimination based on characteristics like race, sex, religion.
Best of luck getting out of what sounds like a very unpleasant situation and into a better one.
And, to the original question, taking all accrued vacation (but no unaccrued vacation) before giving notice is probably your best bet. If you give notice, then announce plans for a 2-week vacation, management can either deny the vacation request or terminate you immediately (paying out or not as per state law and company policy).
Not that I wat to rub salt in your wound here, but how the heck did he get into your e-mail? Did he steal your password somehow? Because there should be no way anyone can get to your e-mail and read it that easily.
As an IT person, this drives me crazy. A person I know who was intending to file legal suit was storing e-mail correspondence in hotmail, and just recently noticed that all of that correspondence had been cleaned out, because his password was not a secret. That’ll be a big speedbump.
Wouldn’t bullying fall under “hostile work environment”?
All I know is at my company the guy’d be fired in a heartbeat if there was any proof of the bullying, and fired soon anyway, if all that documentation existed.
“Hostile work environment” is one of the most frequently misunderstood terms regarding what’s illegal in the workplace. Discrimination based on race and sex (and some other things, but let’s stick to these for the example) are illegal.
One of the ways such discrimination can manifest itself is called “hostile work environment.” That means the environment is hostile to a person or persons based on their race or sex. The original precedent comes from women who claimed sex discrimination based on a pervasive environment of girlie mags, dirty jokes, suggestive comments. This was a breakthrough for women, since they didn’t have to prove something concrete like not getting a specific promotion because they were women, but rather just that the environment overall was hostile toward women. A similar situation could be an African-American employee whose coworkers made racist jokes, hung nooses around the office, etc. And yes, men and whites have the same legal protection in reverse, but the hostility needs to be pervasive and based on race or sex.
Where people get confused is that this does not mean there is a law against someone being just nasty and hostile to you at work. It may be against company policy. It may be against the law if it includes a physical threat, in which case as I said calling the police is not out of line. But there is no law that says the employer has to stop this. The law is against discrimination, and the hostility needs to be descriminatory against a protected characteristic to be illegal.
I hope that clears up the US meaning of hostile work environment. Some other countries (UK, some European countries, maybe Canada) are a bit more progressive in specific anti-bullying laws, although I don’t know the specifics.
Now, there would be good reason to fire an employee who makes a threat to kill another employee, unless it was in the most obvious of jest. First, common sense. Keeping the threatening employee will likely lead to turnover and loss of productivity. Any customer who sees that kind of behavior will be less than impressed. And so on. Also, there is a legal angle, in that if the threat is in fact carried out, and the employer was aware of the threat but didn’t act, the company is at risk of being sued for damages. From my reading of the OPs situation, managment was not made aware of the threat, and therefore couldn’t have been expected to act. Making management aware of inappropriate comments like “you ratted me out” or “OK with you if I work overtime, hee hee?” doesn’t, IMHO, rise to the level of managment needing to fire someone. Also, the damages at this point are at the level of emotional pain & suffering by the OP. That is much less of a legal risk than a death threat being carried out.
If the OP wants to go the lawsuit route, document everything and bring everything to management’s attention, and document that you brought it to management’s attention, and that management didn’t act. Documenting what happened is only half the story, documenting that management knew and didn’t act is the other half. This is not legal advice, IANAL, but I hope it is a valuable counterpoint to assuming there is an easy lawsuit on the table. It’s possible a lawyer in the OP’s state could find an angle I have missed.
I don’t know of a way to password protect email in OS X. We all use the default Mail program (called “Mail”). Also, everyone’s email password here is their first name.
However, the email in which I addressed his overtime was deleted immediately and emptied from the Trash. He either found a way to dig into my Mail program trash or he read my boss’s email. I’m guessing that trashed email is stored somewhere since he still checks my computer daily.
It has been nearly a month since the threat, and part of the reason that I haven’t mentioned it to the boss is because taking it to the boss was the very condition of the threat. The rest of the reason is simply that I’d rather find a new job and move on.
Exactly why you need to report it.
This, and the fact that the boss isn’t doing anything about a co-worker reading your e-mail and possible death threats, suggests that you aren’t going to be paid for your vacation.
I consulted an attorney for a somewhat similar situation once, also based on an e-mail trail something like yours. His advice was that a company can be entirely in the wrong, found to be so in small claims court, and then simply ignore the judgement. It would be up to me to convince the sheriff to enforce any lien I got, and his experience was that this was uncommon. Basically, I was screwed. IANAL, and this was not in Wisconsin.
FWIW.
Regards,
Shodan