Or, there is a very risk-averse HR person. I’ve been stuck with this in the past. Many HR people are paranoid about wrongful termination lawsuits. They figure, they’d rather make the employee **your **problem rather than theirs
Toga party.
That’s the unspoken HR motto in my my industry. I can certainly understand why from a business standpoint, but from a day-to-day coworker standpoint…um, yeah, they WANT you out of there, hint hint.
Unfortunately the OP’s coworker sounds as though she’d be too dumb to realize that.
We have a similar situation in my department. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that the WE WANT YOU OUT OF HERE sign’s been set ablaze, the coworker knows it, and she still refuses to budge. Granted, there are reasons why she’s holding onto the job for dear life, but still…
Actually, I think this is the answer. Our manager wanted to rescind her offer when she wasn’t responding to telephone calls during the background process, but legal said no. In retrospect, the lawsuit, and yes, she would have sued, would have been cheaper and easier than this neverending torment!
We have 2 kinds of former employees here. The first set are alumni. Alumni have time to wrap up their projects, get farewell dinners and parting gifts and have outgoing email and voice mail responses announcing that they’ve left. They also receive severance packages where applicable and receive job search assistance for life, whether or not they ever return to us. We may or may not be relieved that they’ve finally left.
The second set is the disappeared. They are here one day, gone the next. Their voicemail responds that there is no such extension and their email bounces back as no such person on this system. No one will acknowledge that they ever worked here, and virtually all traces of them disappear within 24 hours.
Our organization hates, hates, hates paying unemployment benefits and seems to prefer to keep the losers on payroll, rather than pay benefits.
I have definitely wondered who she is sleeping with or who she has pictures of that she gets to stay. Some of her behavior would have led to instant termination if any one else had done it. Like bragging to Janet the amount of her paycheck due to all the overtime she’s worked because she’s, you know, stupid and had to redo a project 5 times (!) before it was due and had to be used as is. Her net that week was a little less than my gross. So she’s also paid more than us, while we do her work for her.
Maybe I’m the one that should be out looking for a new job.
When it really look hopeless to me, I follow the advice someone gave me a long time ago:
If you are going to be hung as a sheep, you may as well be hung as a goat.
It won’t make anything better, but it sure can be fun.
What they are really afraid of is having their unemployment tax rate go up. . . this is based on what percentage of their workforce they’ve fired. This is the reason for the ugly trend (especially among small & medium business, where a few heads are a huge percentage) of tormenting people into quitting. I’ve been a victim of this.
OTOH, I have known of a few management types who didn’t want people around for reasons that Would Not Pass Muster (not young enough, not pretty enough, not female enough, not white enough) who went the “torment them into quitting route” as well, and for reasons that had nothing to do with unemployment insurance rates. (I’m not saying that’s the case here, just that there are all sorts of reasons for using this stratagem.)
I feel sorry for the exec she works for.
And this I don’t understand. If she hasn’t been hired yet, how can she sue? The company can just say that she didn’t pass the background check, and I’d think that refusing to answer the phone during the process would qualify.
Excellent point. If she’s in her probationary period, can’t they just say, “we’ve decided it won’t work out?”
[hijack]
Last month my dad was laid off from the job that he worked for the past nine years (he was one of the senior salespeople, but was the only one who didn’t belong to the owner’s church). The store only has about six or seven employees. That means the owner will have a good-sized tax hike, right?
I think I’ll share this info with my dad. It’ll make him feel better. 
[/hijack] Back to the OP …
I’m with featherlou on this. Anyone who acts like this coworker should’ve been fired long ago.
A nitpick (since that’s what we do here ) - I know the saying as “Might as well be hung for a goat as a sheep,” meaning that if you’re getting it anyway, might as well make it worth your while. Of course, the saying might be different where you are.
Huh? I thought if you were fired for cause, you didn’t collect unemployment. But I have no experience here, so I could be wrong.
The employer has to be able to prove it was for cause. I was fired once from a new job (back in my retail days) because my manager just didn’t like me. The company said, “You lied on your resume.” On appeal, I was able to collect. I think the company used that line because they thought everybody lies on their resume.
Also, there are times when an employee quits due to bad/hostile work environment and has been able to collect unemployment.
This was in Canada, not the U.S. of course, but I was able to collect unemployment for exactly this reason. This is why you document, document, document.
My response would be to work to rule. Not work to the never ceasing expanding expectations of the employer, but work to rule.
Most of our staff has been on Final Warning for one thing or another. I was once on Final Warning in 3 out of the 4 areas (Hey, I show up!).
We get written verbal warnings. Final Warnings are followed by more training, suspension, demotion, then possibly termination. However, depending on the severity of the incident, you can move from a perfect record to termination in record time. This has actually never happened.
We had to lay off about 17 people a few months ago, it was based on performance. Those with lots of write ups got the axe first. (I had just come back from maternity leave of 90 days so my slate was clean).
The odd thing? I have no sense of job security whatsoever. I avoid my boss like he is the plague. Every day I expect to get a write up for something. Even our customers know we get written up all the time and nothing is done about it. And yet, if I went to work today and was fired, I would not be the least surprised.
The version I’ve always heard is “As well hanged for a sheep as a lamb.” Meaning, I take it, if you’re going to be hanged for stealing, steal something big.
Further nitpick: The idiom for execution via noose is “hanged” in the past tense and past participle, rather than “hung”. “The man was hanged” and “The man was hung” have rather different meanings. 
This actually happened to [del]me[/del]a friend of mine. When threatened with being fired by her supervisor*, she wondered out loud what would happen if certain governmental agencies got copies of something that happened in the office. The supervisor said “Well, that was your fault for not questioning what was going on.” She replied “It was not my job to question what Ms. Dumbshit was doing. She comes in here, doesn’t talk to anyone, and I am not the office manager.”
So this friend was put on probation. Let them fire [del]me[/del] her. I always say “My first rule is keep copies of everything.”
*Supervisor was going through chemo at the time, and shouldn’t have been in the office anyways.
Thanks for correcting my quote for me, guys. Hey, I was brain damaged in an automobile accident, I’m glad that I remember things at all and I have a handy excuse to remember things as they suit me. So there. :rolleyes:
That’s awful, Auntbeast. What a horrible way to work. 