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In light of ”Employment discrimination”, answer the following questions on this case:
A Financial services company has one female manager, Mrs. Amy, who is a supervisor of the tax department. Her mannerisms are quite abrupt and rough and many of the company clients complained her. The company decided that the image of its firm needs a female manager who should act like a female and it might be better if Mrs. Amy was not in a managerial position. Mrs. Amy, as a supervisor of the tax department, hired a number of young employees. She decided to become more friendly with them. She invited one of these young employees, Tony, to go out to dinner and movie. He politely refused. She repeated to ask him out and he continued to refuse. He was getting so upset from her advances that he considered quitting.Tony also has Diabetes and he was under insulin therapy. Mrs. Amy had considered firing Tony because his insulin injections required at least one hour of his work which disrupted many special projects.
Q1: Does Tony have a case against the company with respect to Mrs. Amy’s advances? How did the company protect itself?
Q2: Does Tony have a discrimination case against the company under the ADA of 1990 regarding his diabetes?
Expert Answer
All people to people issues of an organization can be categorized as official and personal issues. The official issues should be dealt with the HR (human resource) policy of the organization. There could be some issues which are more personal in nature, which is out of the purview of the HR policies. Hence it is imperative to deal such issues cautiously. In the instant case the organization should consider Mrs Amy’s advances as wrong as it is officially and personally affecting Mr. Tony adversely. The ill effects of personal affairs are getting spilled over to the work place and affecting the performance of Mr. Tony. Hence the company has to step in and prevent further damages. Its not only that Mr. Tony is affected, but there are several customer complaints against her. Hence taking congnisance of the customer complaints the Finance Department Head and HR Manager of the company should jointly call Mrs. Amy and issue her a show cause notice against her customer complaints. Mr. Tony’s case can be also added towards the end as incase she proves that the customer complaints are trivial and has no substance, Mr. Tony’s case can be put forward. The issue of diabetes is a health issue which should be viewed compassionately as diabetes is a common disease which occurs to almost every one and is nowadays prevalent due to changing life style. He can be asked to work on one holiday to compensate for the loss of working hours. The motto of the company should be to remove her from the post and in the meanwhile look for a suitable replacement. The termination of Mrs. Amy may result in legal issues but by highlighting the customer complaints as the primary cause for termination, the company would be considered exercising principles of natural justice, which any court of law will uphold.
2. As mentioned earlier, diabetes is a lifestyle disease which is commonly affecting a large population. The loss of working hours can be compensated by working for on one holiday per month to balance his working hours required to be put in. As its a health issue, it is responsibility of the company to ensure that the employees are healthy and are give the adequate medical assistance and necessary insurance coverage to overcome any health related consequences.
In case the company takes a stand to fire him on health grounds, Mr. Tony has certainly a discrimination case against the company. The company could be sued on not providing adequate assistance to health. Also Mr. Tony could cite the harassment of Mrs. Amy and the company not doing enough to restrict her advances.
