You cannot expect your employer to keep you on the rolls indefintely while you receive workers' compensation benefits. Sooner rather than later, your employer will force you to make hard choices---as this employee found out. Read our subscribers' advice to this employee as well as our fearless author's responses to that advice.   more »

Veterans preference eligibles who complete more than one year of current and continuous service in the postal service are entitled to the process due to them under 5 U.S.C. section 7513 if they are suspended for more than 14 days under the ELM's emergency placement procedures. After reading this redacted memorandum of law which I sent to the Postal Service advocate in an arbitration I was handling, the Postal Service paid the grievant over $8K in backpay for suspending him for more than 14 days on emergency placement without giving him the process to which he was due. Because management and the union so thoroughly misunderstood the veteran's rights, I believe that this mal-practice is widespread. This redacted memo is only a stop-gap until I can publish a less legalistic newsletter.   more »

Many employees with whom I consult about work-related problems have an imprecise understanding of illegal discrimination. Rightly or wrongly, they believe that mostly all of the inconveniences which befall them at work or elsewhere, including instances of inclement weather, were caused because of some form of discrimination. Their misunderstanding of discrimination, I concluded, was mainly linguistic in origin. �Discrimination� is a nominalization of the verb �discriminate� as harassment is a nominalization of the verb �harass� (properly pronounced like the name Harris). By burying the verb within the noun, the writer of �discrimination� hides from the reader the action conveyed by �discriminate.� Hence: �The agency discriminated against me because I am a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant male� better conveys to the reader what the agency did to the writer than �I was a victim of discrimination because I am �� So the first injunction I make to consultees is that, henceforth, they will never use �discrimination,� but will use �discriminate� instead. But consultees do not usually understand what �discriminate� denotes, because they don�t see the verb �contrast� lurking within �discriminate.� If they did, they would reflexively look to see how the agency is treating them in comparison with how the agency is treating their co-workers. They perceive only that the agency has treated them badly and then scurry off by themselves to an EEO Counselor to initiate an informal complaint. I try to improve their comprehension of discrimination by first exchanging the noun phrase �disparate treatment� for �discrimination� and then converting the nominalization �treatment� to its verb form, infra.    more »

The tale of the disabled letter carrier who could not persuade the postal service to buy him an ergonomic chair to accommodate his low-back injury and how the postal service got away with it.   more »

You would think that if your ex-boyfriend dropped the �F- bomb� on you four or five times one night at work while accusing you of being a female dog, he would be guilty of sexual harassment. Right? It depends.    more »

Unlike Professor Trelawney the courts of this country and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission don�t believe that selecting officials can peer into a crystal ball to divine the future performance of candidates on a best-qualified list. Mainly for this reason (I assert), the courts and the Commission have created the �clearly-better qualified� doctrine. Under this doctrine, in the pretext stage of a disparate treatment case, the unsuccessful candidate must prove by a preponderance of the evidence not merely that she was better qualified than the selectee, but also clearly better qualified. So much better qualified in fact that �disparities in curricula vitae are so apparent, as virtually to jump off the page and slap us in the face."    more »

In the antediluvian epoch, before January 11, 1979, the effective date of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, federal agencies found it much harder to fire an employee whose performance was sub par. Whether they wanted to remove the employee for misconduct or poor performance, the agency had to prove its charges by a preponderance of the evidence, and had to establish that the removal was taken for such cause as would promote the efficiency of the service. Because of the incessant whining of federal managers who complained without good reason that it was impossible to remove poor-performing federal employees, Congress enacted 5 U.S.C.A. � 4303, which made it much easier to fire federal employees accused of unacceptable performance. Indeed, Peter Broida, Esq., the undisputed dean of federal employment law lawyers said, �A well-structured performance action is tough to beat.� Why are Chapter 43 actions so difficult to beat or, more accurately, so easy for the agency to win?    more »

If you are receiving compensation under the Federal Employees Compensation Act for an on-the-job injury , you might reasonably ask why you should consider applying for a FERS or CSRS disability retirement annuity when you are receiving 75% of your monthly pay tax-free. (By contrast, FERS and CSRS retirement annuity payments are taxable. ) Because your agency will remove you for being physically unable to work ; then OWCP might dump you off its rolls after its second-opinion doctor finds you no longer disabled ; and by then it would be too late to file for a disability retirement because you would have been off your agency�s rolls for more than a year. So the femtosecond your agency even starts to menace you about being on comp for so long, you had better start preparing to apply for disability retirement as an alternative to workers� compensation since you cannot collect both at the same time.    more »