No one is being induced to take a stand. We have someone being coerced.
I would tell them to talk to my lawyer.
I don’t actually HAVE a lawyer, but I would deal with that when it came up. I believe that a company would desist from such coersion once the threat of legal action was brought up. Simply because they’d know they were in the wrong.
A shock, that.
That’s sweet.
I don’t think the threat of legal action would be very effective, because disgruntled employees are always threatening to get their lawyers, and they never do. (I spent many years in HR.) However, suddenly finding a TV reporter knocking on your door wanting to know why the CEO is forcing his employees to donate to a charity: that gets their attention. That’s why I suggested making a copy of the message and sending it to the local station’s investigative team.
Have I insulted you in some way?
Couldn’t it be shown that it creates a hostile workplace that would affect employee performance and result in lost opportunity, wage, promotion, and so forth?
A secretary at my company successfully sued a fellow manager in another area because she claimed she had been “berated” over her fingernail length. The EEOC even took her case, and my company settled out of court. Another employee sued my company because the company put “traffic tickets” on her car several times for her not parking in the right lot - she claimed that made a “hostile work environment” and went to court. I do not know if she won.
So don’t try to tell me that a CEO saying what was said in the OP would not be at least heard by a civil court, because I’ve seen far more outrageous cases go to trial. Whether or not they could win I won’t argue, but if I was on a jury and what was presented in the OP was proven true, then I would have no qualms with siding with the plaintiff on nearly any claim they could make for harassment which could be covered under the law.
Monty, I’m not exactly sure where you’re coming from with the point by point analysis of my anecdoctal story, but a few points to clarify for you. First, I wasn’t married, I was single. And living on a patrol boat. Base housing is DOD concept, and by comparison, is rare the CG. So myself and an FA were residing in an an 8x10 six man berthing area, as the barracks was full.
Second, yes it’s a violation of the UCMJ, that was kinda the point. But and E-2 out of bootcamp doesn’t exactly have a careers worth of military personnel and law knowledge in their seabag. Not that it would matter. The reason the CFC campaign became such a problem in the CG, was because it started with the Admirals. The flags were the ones who wanted their districts to have the best donation percentages, so that bullshit filtered down the ranks. My XO was a JO, and the CO was an JO. They worked for a PATBOATRON (O4), who worked for the Group Commander (Captain). Believe me when I say, I wasn’t the only one pressured in that manner. Everyone in the chain was pressured one way or another. A CO’s OER would reflect if the GruCom was the type to make it that way. And when a GruCom was answering to a district Admiral, he became “that type”. This, or course, wasn’t always the case, but in the late 80’s - early 90’s, strongarm CFC tactics were a huge problem. Senior CG officers are more “CEO” nowadays than anything else; we’re too intertwined with industry.
Third, I’m aware of how the CFC works. I’ve been the unit CFC coordinator on more than one occasion since then. Still haven’t given, though.
Also, while I’ve never seen it personally seen it, older salts have said that liberty sometimes was witheld until they contributed something to CFC or Mutual Assistance (an “in house” program"). Of course it’s illegal. We didn’t get the nick “Hooligan’s Navy” for nothing. Lots of illegal, immoral and unethical shit went on as a matter of course. It has since been cleaned up for the most part, but that’s just the way it used to be. If you want to hear it from the salts themselves, hop on over to Military.com, the Coast Guard - Point/Counterpoint discussion board and ask them. It’s a subject that comes up, oh, about once a year.
Oh, and our “Officers Call” is when the command musters the entire crew, usually after lunch or at the end of the day. These are small crews, remember. Enlisted only or divisional is justed called “muster”.
Agree completely.
Disgruntled employees making vague claims about the law or lawyers aren’t impressive to HR. First, in a lot of cases, it’s obvious that the employee isn’t the kind of person who has a lawyer. Blowhard threats about “hearing from my lawyer” aren’t real credible here, especially when it’s pretty obvious that the employee doesn’t know what he’s talking about on legal issues. HR people usually have a basic understanding of what’s not legally permissible. (A somewhat more credible threat might be a stated intention to see a lawyer.)
The press angle is much more likely to work.
Although you weren’t responding to me…
I don’t disagree with you. I’m just thinking on the history of some ludicrous suits which I have personal experience with at my company. It seemed to me from my ignorance of the subtleties of civil law standpoint that the UW memo would be as least as damaging behaviour as other things I’ve seen.
Shoot, my company had the EEOC after them twice by people who claimed that they didn’t have to follow our corporate dress code because it violated their “tribal heritage”. Another was on a construction site, and claimed that wearing the OSHA-required safety gear (including hard hat and safety glasses) “violated their Civil Rights”, and the EEOC actually took their case! They lost, but not after tens of thousands of dollars were spent by us defending ourselves against the EEOC, who seemed to have unlimited time and expenses to pursue a blantantly frivilous claim.
So I’ll defer to your knowledge of what can and cannot be actionable. All I was trying to say was - it seemed that way by sad example. 
Insulted, no. Annoyed, yes.
Im sorry, but your statements in this thread show a lack of understanding about legal issues and familiarity with lawyers. If you (as an employee) made similar statements to your HR department and threatened to turn this over to “your lawyer”, you wouldn’t be believed. (see above)
The second statement you made (about a corporation desisting because “they knew they were in the wrong” in the face of empty legal threats) shows particular naivete.
Your recommended course of action would likely lead to two results: 1) Some small cosmetic changes in the United Way campaign at your office that change nothing; and 2) the effective end of the complainer’s career, if not an outright firing. Threats of legal action against your employer tend not to go over very well.
If you believe that I am wrong, and there is a legal theory that clearly makes the employer’s actions legally actionable (as you appear to believe), please provide a cite. (I’ve previously suggested a couple possible theories, but wouldn’t recommend either to a client. They’re long shots.)
I’m coming from pointing out obviously incorrect statements.
Nowhere did I say you weren’t married. To the contrary, I obviously noticed that you mentioned you were saving up to get married.
So you are aware that it does exist in the CG. I should’ve also mentioned that in the absence of available base housing, the married folks get extra money for housing in the civilian community.
That may have also been against the regs, absent the responsible commanding officer lawfully redesignating a certain housing unit as family housing.
Pure bullshit. If you’re going to tell lies, tell good ones. Just so you know, I was on active duty through the 1980s and 1990s.
With the bald-faced misrepresentation you’ve given here, then you probably sucked at that job.
The bolding in the quote below is mine.
I bolded that because you asserted something above as fact. You now admit that you do not know if it happened or not. You repeated what is essentially a FOAF (“friend of a friend”) story. You knowingly passed it off as though it were known to you to be factual. That is known as a lie. Again, if you’re going to tell lies, make them good lies.
Officer’s Call is when the CO or OIC gets his or her officers together and discusses the business of the unit. Captain’s Call or Officer’s in Charge’s Call is what you’ve described above.
And I feel the need to quote Random here. You have annoyed me with your ridiculous story. Hey, I like fiction as much as the next person. Just don’t pass fiction off as truth.
Freaking typos! “Nowhere did I say you weren’t married.” should be “Nowhere did I say you were married.”
I have scrupulously avoided United Way since the early 90s. I used to get the strong-arm at work before then, and donated, thinking I was doing a good thing.
Then the William Aramony thing broke. Google “William Aramony” and “United Way” to read the whole sordid tale. He was head of United Way. 60-something guy, who was spending UW funds to go on lavish trips, and to buy gifts, for his teenage girlfriend. When caught with his hand in the cookie jar, his lawyer interposed a defense that he was suffering from “brain shrinkage.” And UW is still paying him a retirement package, as the moron lawyers over there didn’t put in any sort of “void for malfeasance” clause.
UW has also repeatedly been pursued by state authorities for its coercive tactics. You can read a lot of stories on that on www.nptimes.com In fact, if your CEO is doing this, might be worth contacting local consumer affairs folks to see whether there has been a breach of the law.
Oh yeah, I also really don’t like those UW-NFL ads, as I perceive them to be totally artificial. I doubt those guys are doing much charity work with UW beyond what it takes to film the ad…
You would have been next. 
I’m glad you supplemented your response, although I had a great analogy to a patent-office application for a perpetual motion coal burning machine that’s now wasted.
Sure, frivolous claims are filed every day.
–phone call interruption that now means I’m going to have to rush this–
Most of your cited situations have some sort of tenuous relation to a possible claim. (Claims need to be both legally and factually sufficient. Even if you prove all of your allegations, they still have to legally set forth a claim. Not everything that’s wrong or bad in a common sense way is legally actionable.)
For example, your fingernail case probably was couched as a sexual or gender discrimination claim. There have been cases where dress codes have been struck down on this basis. There also have been dress code cases (that actually make sense to me) relating to Sikh turbans, Jewish yarmulkes, and Muslim headscarves. As you might expect, these are pleaded as religious or national origin discrimination claims. The point is that all of these kinds of discrimination are prohibited by statute.
Discrimination based upon whether you contribute to United Way is not.
(except, possibly, for the weak religious dicrimination theory I suggested earlier.)
—another phone interuption. now I really am out of time and have to cut this off.—
I’ve got a one-woman boycott going on against the United Way. I work at a university and everyone is STRONGLY encouraged to donate something. It begins with e-mails from the secretaries informing us that the fund drive is underway and announcing free apples when we pick up our forms. Next comes an updated daily page depicting what our department has donated so far, and how far off we are from some pre-determined goal. Accompanying this is a listing of names of people who have not yet returned their contribution forms and a reminder that it’s mandatory to do so. This will be followed up by a personal visit from our departmental chair’s secretary who presents me a listing of members in my lab who haven’t returned their forms.
In the past, I’ve gone to each of these people (bear in mind most of the people in my lab are not native born Americans so have little to no knowledge of the United Way.) and explained what the United Way is and informed them that they had the choice of donating or not, but it was mandatory that they at least sign the form and return it, marking $0 if no donation was made. After last year’s drive, I was informed that our lab had the lowest level ($12) of donations of any in the university and that this was unacceptable. I had thought that perhaps this year I would handle it differently, giving each person in our lab $10 or so to donate, but the more I think of it, I rather doubt I will.
I’m opposed to the United Way for a number of reasons, and making donations for my lab members would compromise my principles here. I strongly disagree with their strong-arm tactics, their ridiculously high cost of overhead, the morals of some of their senior officers (see the case above), and the fact that even if I specifically state which charities I want my contribution to go to, there is no guarantee that it will wind up there.
Return the form with the “I am not contributing” block checked.
If anyone’s interested in the military’s policy on how the CFC campaign’ll be run, click here.
Heck I’d have been the first guy ot the mailboxes and stripped those $60 and went out to dinner. 
My company does the pass out forms to everyone thing too, you’re “required” to return the form. I refused to return the form without a charge code to bill it to on my timecard and promptly threw it away in front of our secretary. Did swipe the “contribution” tietac they give you for returning the form out of principle.
blasphemer: At every civilian job I had where there were timecodes for billing work, such things as filling out the form were done under whatever the code for “Administrative/paperwork” was.
In this thread, so far, I’ve seen irrational ranting, outright falsehoods, and someone admitting to be a thief because he’s peeved at someone simply asking for funds.
GET A GRIP!
If you don’t want to contribute, DON’T! And if your boss tries something illegal to force you to do it, you have recourse.
Well let’s try to make the points without the inults(like in this post, not the previous post). I’m a pretty open kind of guy.
Can someone explain why any company would care about employee donations to United Way? What’s in for them?
I agree with sending the message to a radio talk show host. Specifically ManCow. You’d probably get a week of airplay on this bullshit. But do it anonymously.