On Firing Drunk Temps

The City Of Fort Worth's Human Relations Commission sent me a letter a few days ago.

It marked the end of a long, tiresome, wasteful process that hit on employment law, civil rights, racism, ageism, skinism, alcoholism, paternalism, bureaucracies, and whether or not I should have the right to purchase the labor of whoever I dang well please. 

It also touches on whether I should be able to stop purchasing someone's labor when it suits me.

I've clipped (and redacted) various parts of the letter so as to protect the guilty. 

Here's the cast of characters:

1)  The Charging Party - an employee that a temp service sent us back in freakin' June.  He showed up around 8:00 a.m., and we sent him back before 9:00 a.m.  (It's not unusual for me to send temps back to Their Mother Ship before their shift has ended, BTW.  We're nice about it, we're apologetic, and we wish them best of luck in all future endeavors.  But there's a good reason that some of those folks don't work for NASA or the Nobel Prize Committee.)  The Charging Party is the guy who sued us for discrimination. 

2)  The Temp Service - many employers now use temp or personnel services to screen their potential employees for 3 months before hiring them.  The temp services generally charge twice what the employee gets paid.  Yeah, twice.  But it's worth it to avoid paying Unemployment Compensation, or risk paying big bucks in an Unlawful Discharge lawsuit.  Some temps don't last but a few days, and there's a huge paperwork cost associated with bringing on a new employee, so after 3 months you have a better idea if the employee will work out or not.  Until three months have passed, the temp employee works for the Temp Service, and not for the facility where he is actually doing work. 

3)  Randy Morales - he doesn't exist. 

4)  The White Trainer who was supposedly drunk - he doesn't exist either, despite your sneaking suspicion that he is me. 

5)  The Respondent - my employer, Jukt Micronics.  The organization that had to respond to, deal with, and be burdened by this mess. 

6)  The Assistant Human Resources Director - the lady who is our Assistant Human Resources Director. 

Another group was kept busy determining our percentages of Black, Latino, Asian and White employees.  Then they had to calculate our ratio of employees older and younger than 54.  Try doing that with 700 people.  More on that later....

That's all you need to know to enjoy the following.    Here's part of the letter. 

Sorry for blacking out a lot of the pertinent case numbers, but I don't want the emissions people, the water inspectors, OSHA, or the noise abatement teams of Fort Worth to start swarming me because I picked on one of their bureaucracies. 

Please note that this process started on June 5th, and we got the resolution letter on December 2nd. 
God help the USA if other nations ever discover free market economics.

I gotta make a correction to that 2nd paragraph.  "The Charging Party" wasn't accused of just drinking on the job.  He was freakin' hammered.  Gapped.  Faced.  Blotto.  Some of our notorious alcoholics, guys who spend their weekends with faint traces of blood in their alcohol, they were asking us to send this guy away. 

At this point, if you've been paying attention, you're wondering why I'm involved in this at all, right?  The guy didn't even work for me !!! 

It seems that if you hire a temp employee, then send him away, he can still claim discrimination against you based on "his Race, Black, and his Age", to use the awkward phrase of the City Of Fort Worth's Human Relations Division.  I didn't know that until June. 

The letter refers to a White man who was drinking but was not disciplined or discharged.  It wasn't me.  Swear to God, it wasn't me. 

Back to the letter....

Ok, here's how this thing went down.  Ordinarily when a temp isn't working out, I just tell him that we don't need his services any more, and that he can clock out and go home.  Then I call the temp service and tell them to never, ever send that guy back to us. 

But when the temp is drunker than the Quality Control department at Jack Daniels?  We call the temp service manager in to deal with it. 

When they're that drunk, we let THEM send the dude home.  The Temp Service Manager came in, told the guy he couldn't work drunk, and sent him home. 

Regarding the last sentence in the letter, the one about Randy Morales....  there is no one in our company named Randy Morales.  We've never had a foreman named Randy Morales.  But if anyone named Randy Morales had been around, he would've smelled alcohol on this guy. 

So it was the trainer who smelled of alcohol, but just in case it was the temp smelled of alcohol it was because of his mouthwash and toothpaste.  Lordy. 

Here's a quick summary. 

The drunk temp demanded that the Personnel Service give him a drug and alcohol test.  They refused.  So he went to JPS (John Peter Smith Hospital) in Fort Worth and asked them to give him an alcohol test. 

John Peter Smith is our county hospital.  They treat a lot of low-income, indigent patients, and do a great job of it. 
But you can go in there with an amputated arm and you will still wait for a long, long time before getting treatment. 
This guy got sent home by the temp service, was denied a drug/alcohol test, drove to JPS, waited long enough for small mammals to evolve, and was still feeling a "Buzz".   It had to be hours and hours later!!

To paraphrase Meg Ryan, "I'll have what he's drinking". 

Here comes the part that should make you angry:

Here's why I hope you're angry. 

1)  Yeah, we hire lots of older people.  And we hire Black, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, El Salvadoran, Laotian, and Mississippi Rednecks.  My shop looks like the United Freakin' Nations.  180 people from...Earth. 
But our office employees had to drop everything else and do some racist nose-counting, just like we were separating the Hutus from the Tutsis, and report our racial makeup to the Fort Worth Freakin' Human Relations Commission. 

2)  The guy doesn't even work for me. 

3)  The process took 6 months. 

4)  We're paying the government to investigate this stuff. 
If you get tired of purchasing burgers from McDonald's and decide to purchase burgers from Wendy's, you don't have to do a verbal warning, a written warning, a 3-day suspension, and then formally terminate McDonald's.  You can just switch.  For reasons that I'll never understand, labor doesn't work that way, and most of us live diminished lives because of it. 

Our employers are expected to withhold and pay our taxes, provide our healthcare, take care of child support payments, our retirement, and our 40 acres and our mule.   Employment Law creates a huge burden for companies, increases the cost of goods without providing a benefit, and creates massive HR Departments which cost a fortune, but that add no value to the products the companies were founded to produce.

Think of how much easier it would be for you to go work someplace else if it weren't so much like changing plantations in 1845.   

5)  Finally, this process, designed to ensure racial fairness, often creates racists. 

Yeah.  It creates racists. 

I employ people from all over the world.  Most of them are awesome, personally and professionally. 

But will I now hesitate to hire someone who is of a different race, or of an advanced age?  Someone who could sue me if it doesn't work out? 

You tell me. 

Oh yeah, here's the end of the letter.  We weren't guilty of anything. 

There are days when I want to resign and turn the whole thing over to Randy Morales. 
 

It's mostly bullshit

Here's Mark Steyn on the increasing number of statements found to be lies in Barack Obama's "Dreams From My Father".  Thanks to an exhaustive new bio by David Maraniss (a lefty, BTW), we now have something closer to the truth:

Courtesy of David Maraniss’s new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.”

Ok, he lied.  He made it up.  He invented people.  Composites.  So what? 

Well, look around the intertubes at the staggering amount of bandwidth devoted to the total bullshit found in Obama's book.  Here's just one example for you.  Don't bother reading it (because it makes no sense), just look at the academic smartwords sprinkled throughout:

As stated above, Obama took without hesitation the ethnically charged role of the cultural interpreter or mediator to explain the historical sources of black rage and resentment toward Euro-Americans; in other words, he reminded Euro-Americans that African Americans had good reasons to be angry. In fact, this type of “translation” had been an intrinsic aspect of Obama’s youth: “I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere” (76). Therefore, whereas he otherwise discourages absolute identity along racial lines, in this and other occasions he has spoken not only as a black man but also for African Americans; that is, as a representative of the black community in the United States. In fact, according to Mostern, this type of “testimony on behalf of” is “clearly one element in all African-American Autobiography Study (though how significant an element is something about which critics differ)” (33). Paradoxically, Obama suggests, in the introduction to Dreams of My Father, that he does not possess the moral authority to address or represent the totality of the experience of black people: “I can embrace my black brother and sisters, whether in this country or in Africa, and affirm a common destiny without pretending to speak to, or for, all our various struggles” (x). This peculiarity distances his writing from the subgenre of the testimonio, since testimonialists usually present themselves as the synecdoche of their aggrieved social groups. In any case, at the same time that he reminds blacks that they have the right and duty to be different from their own pasts, the Janus-faced Obama admonished the rest of the country of the immorality of historical amnesia. He later sends the same message in The Audacity of Hope: “to acknowledge the sins of our past and the challenges of the present without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair” (233). It is in this sense that Obama’s two books as well as some of his speeches can be interpreted as an act of deciphering one half of himself—Black American—for the other half and for the rest of the “white folks,” as they are referred to sometimes in his books.

Unfortunately, all of that is based on bullshit.  Top to bottom bullshit. 
Barack Obama is just this....thing.  He's an invention.  We don't know much about his past.  We don't know what he was doing at Occidental College.  He has presented himself as the result of a racial struggle that apparently didn't happen.  People have loved the story, but he isn't real.  We have no idea what the hell he is. 

Even the people who like the idea of Obama as president will probably admit, if hooked to lie detectors, that they don't like the reality of this invention as President Of The United States. 

We have no idea who this man is. 
And you sure can't find out from reading his books. 

 

The Unspeakable meets The Unfiskable

My friend NickM, of the Counting Cats blog, is never at a loss for words.  Never.  Ever. 
But then he encountered THIS. 

All he could do was highlight the worst parts. 

We're "A Nation Of Cowards", and here's the reason why....

Eric Holder, the new Attorney General, says that we are a "nation of cowards" when it comes to discussing race.

Eric Holder has taken a lot of heat for this, but he is 100% correct. We don't talk about race, except in the most guarded terms. Then we change the subject as quickly as possible.

Here's the reason why. This is from The Huffington Post:

A cartoon likening the author of the stimulus bill, perhaps President Barack Obama, with a rabid chimpanzee graced the pages of the New York Post on Wednesday.
The drawing, from famed cartoonist Sean Delonas, is rife with violent imagery and racial undertones. In it, two befuddled-looking police officers holding guns look over the dead and bleeding chimpanzee that attacked a woman in Stamford, Connecticut.

At its most benign, the cartoon suggests that the stimulus bill was so bad, monkeys may as well have written it. Others believe it compares the president to a rabid chimp. Either way, the incorporation of violence and (on a darker level) race into politics is bound to be controversial. Perhaps that's what Delonas wanted.

Of course it's bound to be controversial. Hell, I can't believe I've gathered up the nerve to write anything about it. But let's start with a few obvious facts:

1) The cartoon isn't very funny.
2) Delonas has an editor who approved the cartoon's publication.
3) Look at the Huffington quote in italics above. They said "on a darker level", as if to imply that light is good and dark is bad. Silly, isn't it? But I find myself avoiding phrases like that all the time. If someone really wanted to make a racial issue of that sentence, they could easily do so.
4) The symbolism used in the cartoon is waaaay out there, especially in terms of the racist symbolism that was often used in the Deep South.
5) But the cartoon provides a muted commentary on the quality of the stimulus bill. A million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years couldn't have produced anything as bad as that abomination.
6) Al Sharpton and Julian Bond and plenty of others are issuing critical statements attacking the New York Post, calling for the cartoonist's head, and doing whatever they can to get back in the limelight somewhere far away from the Obama glare.
7) Anyone who dares to talk about race in a public forum is insane. That includes Eric Holder. That includes me. There are a lot of sociologists who predict that within the next 20 generations or so there won't be any "races" left. This would eliminate racism, tribalism, and a host of other harmful isms, wouldn't it?
8) But getting back to the subject at hand....if I were a monkey, and someone drew a cartoon about me writing the stimulus bill? I'd be angry.

Hillary, Fear Of A Black Planet, Yellow Dog Democrats

Former Clinton advisor Dick Morris has some interesting observations about how The Clintons will play the race card.
(The only way I'll have a dog in that fight is if Huckabee gets the nomination or Ron Paul dies, but anyway....)
The essence of Morris's argument is that Obama will take something like 80% of the African-American vote. Why that number isn't higher is God's own mystery.
So The Clintons have more to gain by writing off the Black vote altogether, and prey on the Fear Of A Black Planet sentiments of aging Yellow Dog Democrats in the deep south and elsewhere. (That's my prediction of who they'll aim for, not Morris's.)
All of this will be done by surrogates, of course.

If you believe that The Clintons could never do something like this, please use the comment field below.

BTW, The Clintons ran unopposed in Michigan last night and a large number of people showed up for the sole purpose of voting "uncommitted". Exit polling has revealed that a large number of those were minority votes. Here's the always excellent Jay Cost, from the Horserace blog:

As for the Democratic side - the big story is Hillary Clinton losing the African American vote to "uncommitted." The exit poll pegged African Americans going against Clinton, 68% to 30%. It appears that opposition by African Americans induced a split in Wayne County (where Detroit is), 50% to Hillary, 45% to uncommitted. People in the media are going to connect these results to the racial kerfuffle of the last few days - and they are partially right to do so. But I think there is more to it than this. Since his Iowa victory, Obama's numbers among African American voters have been trending upward. Tonight's results are another indication that African Americans are breaking his way. The Clinton campaign should be worried about this. It appears as if Obama might be able to take an important part of the traditional Democratic coalition. He is thus moving beyond the relatively narrow appeal of previous "insurgent" Democratic candidates like Bill Bradley and Gary Hart. This is bad news for Clinton.

Barack Obama, barring some massive ethical lapse, is going to be President of The United States one day. Maybe not this time, running against someone who thinks HE was the First Black President, or Monica Lewinsky's boyfriend's wife, but it's going to happen.