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It’s worse than we thought. Workplace rudeness isn’t just corrosive — it’s catching.  

Alisson Clark, writing on the University of Florida website, reports that a recent U of F study indicates that encountering rude behavior at work makes people more likely to perceive rudeness in later interactions.

The perception makes them more likely to be impolite in return, spreading rudeness like a virus, she says.

“When you experience rudeness, it makes rudeness more noticeable,” Clark quotes lead author Trevor Foulk, a doctoral student in management at UF’s Warrington College of Business Administration. “You’ll see more rudeness even if it’s not there.”

The study findings were recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The researchers say they’re the first  hard evidence that everyday impoliteness spreads in the workplace.

The study tracked 90 graduate students practicing negotiation with classmates. Those who rated their initial negotiation partner as rude were more likely to be rated as rude by a subsequent partner, showing that they passed along the first partner’s rudeness. The effect continued even when a week elapsed between the first and second negotiations.

Second-hand rudeness?

Rudeness directed at others can also prime our brains to detect discourtesy, Clark said.

Foulk and his co-authors, fellow doctoral student Andrew Woolum and UF management professor Amir Erez, tested how quickly 47 undergraduate students could identify which words in a list were real and which were nonsense words. Before the exercise began, participants observed one of two staged interactions between an apologetic late-arriving participant and the study leader. When the leader was rude to the latecomer, the participants identified rude words on the list as real words significantly faster than participants who had observed the neutral interaction.

The impact of secondhand rudeness didn’t stop there, however: Just like those who experience rudeness firsthand, people who witness it were more likely to be rude to others. When study participants watched a video of a rude workplace interaction, then answered a fictitious customer email that was neutral in tone, they were more likely to be hostile in their responses than those who viewed a polite interaction before responding.

“Part of the problem is that we are generally tolerant of these behaviors, but they’re actually really harmful,” Foulk said. “Rudeness has an incredibly powerful negative effect on the workplace.”

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed a religious discrimination lawsuit against package delivery giant United Parcel Service.  

According to papers filed in federal District Court in New York, UPS violated federal law by discriminating against applicants and employees around the country whose religious practices conflicted with its uniform and appearance policy.

UPS prohibits male employees in customer contact or supervisory positions from wearing beards or growing their hair below collar length. According to EEOC’s complaint, since at least 2004, UPS has failed to hire or promote individuals whose religious practices conflict with its appearance policy and has failed to provide religious accommodations to its appearance policy at facilities throughout the United States.

The agency offered several situations in which, it is alleged, UPS violated anti-bias law:

• A Muslim who applied for a driver helper position in Rochester, N.Y., who wears a beard as part of his religious observance, was told he had to shave to get the position. He was also told, “God would understand” if he shaved his beard to get a job and that he could apply for a lower-paying job if he wanted to keep his beard.
  Muslims and Christians at other facilities were forced to shave their beards in violation of their religious beliefs while they waited months or years for UPS to act on their requests for religious accommodation, EEOC said.
• Similarly, a Rastafarian part-time load supervisor in Fort Lauderdale, who does not cut his hair as part of his religious beliefs, asked for an accommodation of the appearance policy. His manager told him he did not “want any employees looking like women on (his) management team.” Rastafarians in other parts of the country were denied positions or waited years for their requests for accommodation to be granted so they could finally get the position they sought, the agency claims.

According to company information, UPS is the nation’s largest package delivery company, operating in every state in the country. The Atlanta-based company employs over 300,000 people nationwide, with additional operations around the globe.

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This new court ruling is a clear shot across the bow of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). 

As we’ve reported several times now, the NLRB has been on a scorched-earth crusade to find and stop any employer activity or policy it believes might stymie employees’ rights under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act.

Two of the biggest mandates of Section 7:

• Employers cannot prohibit employees from wearing union clothes on the job, and
• Employers cannot prohibit employees from participating in concerted activities meant to improve working conditions.

Recently, the Communication Workers of America, the union representing AT&T employees, filed charges with the NLRB claiming the communications giant violated Section 7 when it asked employees to remove union shirts before going face to face with employees.

The shirts were white with black lettering. The front of the shirt said “Inmate#” and the back of the shirt said “Prisoner of AT$T,” with several vertical stripes above and below the lettering.

The company allowed employees to wear the shirts in non-customer-facing positions, but instructed employees not to wear them when interacting with customers or working in public.

The company said the shirts could:

• alarm or confuse customers
• cause them to believe that AT&T employees were actually convicts, or
• harm the company’s public image.

Employees suspended

When 183 customer-facing employees disobeyed the company’s orders to remove the shirts, they received a one-day suspension. The union then filed an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB, claiming AT&T’s disciplinary actions violated Section 7.

AT&T argued its actions fell under the “special circumstances” exception to Section 7, which says a company can prohibit employees from displaying messages on the job that it reasonably believes may harm its relationship with customers or its public image.

An administrative law judge disagreed with AT&T, and ruled the company’s actions violated Section 7. The judge’s ruling was then upheld by the NLRB.

The judge said the company’s actions didn’t stand up to the “special circumstances” exception because the shirts “would not have been reasonably mistaken for prison garb” and that “the totality of the circumstances would make it clear” that the technician wearing the shirt was “not a convict.”

Therefore, according to the judge and the NLRB, the shirt was unlikely to damage AT&T’s relationship with customers or its public image.

AT&T responded to the rulings by taking its case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Whose side was it on?

NLRB was ‘unreasonable’

The court sided with AT&T and said it was well within its rights to punish the employees who wore the union shirt. It vacated the judge’s and NLRB’s rulings.

But in doing so Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote the court’s decision, had some pretty harsh things to say about the NLRB.

The first sentence Kavanaugh wrote: “Common sense sometimes matters in resolving legal disputes.”

Ouch!

Kavanaugh then went on to say that the NLRB applied Section 7’s “special circumstances” exception in an “unreasonable” way. He said the appropriate test of special circumstances “is not whether AT&T’s customers would confuse the “Inmate/Prisoner” shirt with actual prison garb, but whether AT&T could reasonably believe that message may harm its relationship with its customers or public image.”

And, according to Kavanaugh, “given the straightforward evidence that AT&T introduced of the shirt’s message and the circumstances under which customers interact with or can see employees wearing the shirt, the Board should have held that ‘special circumstances’ applied here.”

In the court’s conclusion, Kavanaugh fired one final shot at the NLRB, when he wrote: “As this Court observed in Medco Health (a past case), however, the Board’s ‘expertise is surely not at its peak in the realm of employer-customer relations.’”

Double-ouch.

Takeaway for employers: While the NLRB may isn’t shy about interpreting Section 7 very broadly, and can be a bit heavy-handed when ruling on Section 7 matters, it should provide relief to know that some courts clearly aren’t in the same corner as the board.

Cite: Southern New England Telephone Company (AT&T subsidiary) v. NLRB

Ah, the irony: A major Midwest healthcare organization has agreed to pay $80,000 to a woman whose job offer was withdrawn — because of her medical condition.  

Aurora Health Care, Inc. will fork over the $80k and furnish other relief to settle a disability discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency has announced.

The EEOC’s lawsuit charged that in 2009, Aurora withdrew a job offer it had made to Kelly Beckwith for a position as hospice care coordinator upon learning during her pre-employment medical examination that she has multiple sclerosis, a serious disease which affects the body’s neurological system.

Beckwith had been diagnosed with MS some years earlier, but had not yet developed major symptoms. At the time she applied, Beckwith was working as a nurse.

Aurora claimed Beckwith failed to disclose her MS, but the EEOC alleged that the condition was properly disclosed and that Beckwith’s MS was the true reason for the withdrawal of the job offer. The EEOC alleged that Aurora discriminated against Beckwith because of her disability by misusing confidential medical information to discriminate against her, and by using a qualification standard that tends to discriminate against those who are disabled.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin approved a two-year consent decree.

In addition to the $80,000 in monetary relief to Beckwith, the decree contains an injunction prohibiting the company from withdrawing job offers from disabled individuals based on information learned during pre-employment medical examinations and from retaliating against employees who exercise their rights under federal law.

Additionally, the decree requires the company to adopt a written policy with standards and procedures for investigating allegations that a job applicant was dishonest or failed to disclose something during the medical examination. Aurora must keep records for all individuals whose job offers are rescinded based on information obtained in the medical examination or under its new policy and report this information to the EEOC.

According to its website,  Aurora is a private, not-for-profit health care provider operating 15 hospitals and 159 clinics in Wisconsin and Illinois, with 30,000 employees.

There are certain things that will never, ever mix well like oil and water or corporate team-building activities and ISIS execution reenactments. But that didn’t stop these finance employees from trying the latter.  

As reported by The Sun, six HSBC employees were fired for a video they released during an apparent team-building exercise. The video shows five of the workers pretending to be members of ISIS and “beheading” a sixth worker, who played the role of hostage and worn an orange jumpsuit like many of the victims in actual ISIS executions.

In the video, which was posted on Instagram and later taken down, the ISIS-impersonating employees donned jumpsuits and balaclavas and used a coat hanger as a knife-substitute.

During the video, the hostage kneels down to be “executed” while one executioner/banker yells out “Allahu Akbar,” which is Arabic for “God is great.”

Other victims of social-media stupidity

As you can imagine, HSBC didn’t find the bankers’ idea of team-building amusing and a company spokesman told The Sun (Note: British spelling in the quote):

We do not tolerate inappropriate behaviour. As soon as The Sun brought this video to our attention we took the decision to sack the individuals involved. This is an abhorrent video and HSBC would like to apologise for any offence caused.

Of course, the HSBC bankers are hardly unique. There are scores of workers who lost their jobs due to poor social-media decisions. Rolling Stone offers a brief history of the most memorable firings in recent memory, which include Paula Deen, that Taco Bell employee who got caught urinating  on food and a paramedic who took selfies with corpses.