HR World: September 2014
Circulating porn, stress-related diabetes and getting fired for being too ChristianAussie workers sacked for circulating porn ‘unfairly dismissed’
It’s probably fair to say that looking at porn in the office, let alone emailing it to colleagues, is not the best way to advance your career – but according to the Federal Court of Australia, it’s not necessarily a sacking offence, either.
According to IT publication The Register, the court recently upheld a decision by the Fair Work Commission, the country’s industrial relations tribunal, which found that national mail service provider Australia Post was wrong to sack three male workers for forwarding pornographic material to colleagues at the Dandenong Letter Centre.
The men in question were among 40 staff discovered to be circulating offensive emails after the company installed web filters in 2010. The long-standing employees were later dismissed.
However, the dismissal was ruled unfair on the grounds that not only had the company’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy on pornography not been enforced, but that a culture encouraging the behaviour had actually been allowed to flourish.
Daniel Victory, representing the workers, said: “This case was not about the rights and wrongs of circulating pornographic material at work… It was about the gulf between the policies of Australia Post and the culture at the Dandenong Letter Centre, and the way Australia Post went about addressing it.
“Despite having a policy in place, Australia Post did not take active steps to apply and enforce [it]. A culture had arisen where an extraordinary amount of inappropriate email traffic involving a large number of employees occurred over an extended period of time. Supervisors and managers were aware of it, and in some cases participated in it, and did not take action to enforce the policy.”
Many other employees who had also breached the policy, including managers, did not lose their jobs, he added.
German study links high-stress, low-control jobs to diabetes risk
People who have demanding jobs but little control over how they manage them are more than 60 per cent more likely to develop type 2 diabetes, according to German researchers.
First published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine and reported by Reuters, the study by scientists at the Technical University in Munich tracked more than 5,000 men and women in Germany over 12 years. None had diabetes at the outset and all completed a detailed questionnaire to measure their job strain.
Participants with demanding jobs and little say in how the work got done were considered to have ‘high job strain’. Meanwhile those with demanding jobs but more control, and those with undemanding jobs, were considered to have ‘low job strain’.
By the end of the study, 300 participants had developed type 2 diabetes, and the greatest proportion came from the high job strain group. According to researchers, this group had a 63 per cent greater chance of developing the disease than the group with low job strain.
Factoring in age, sex, family history of the disease and weight had no impact on this result, and although the gap did close slightly when socioeconomic status and physical work intensity were taken into account, it was still significant.
To begin with, researchers thought the diabetes risk might be related to the fact that people with stressful jobs are more likely to smoke or eat unhealthy food – but this was not the case, said lead study author Karl-Heinz Ladwig. Instead, he and his team suspected the stress hormone cortisol could be to blame.
US bank clerk sacked for being too Christian
A bank clerk fired for using religious language in her interaction with customers is suing her former employer, U.S. Bank, for wrongful termination.
Committed Christian Polly Neace – who had worked for U.S. Bank in Walton, Kentucky, for 24 years at the time of her termination – said she had been telling customers to “have a blessed day” for years, according to Fox 19.
But in 2011, following several customer complaints, Neace was told to stop using the phrase and issued with a Code of Ethics violation. The written warning also cited an incident where she asked a customer not to take the Lord’s name in vain and talked to him about salvation.
The notice said: “Effective immediately you will no longer discuss the subject of faith or religion with customers and co-workers alike.”
A few months later she received another warning when a customer said “God bless you,” and she responded in kind. The situation came to a head soon after, when she complained about a situation at work and joked with a supervisor that she might as well go back to saying, “Have a blessed day.” She was fired the next day.
In an interview with Fox News, Neace claimed she failed to understand her employer’s problem. “I don’t think there’s any better kind of day you can have than a blessed day,” she said.
U.S. Bank disagrees. “We hold our employees to high ethical standards when interacting with customers and co-workers, and take violations of these standards seriously,” it said in a statement. “While we cannot provide comment on pending litigation, we believe that this lawsuit is without merit.”
About the author
