Aside from the paternity leave issue, how did Disney know his wife was pregnant? How is that unwanted harassment and comment from colleagues permissible?
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Deep packet inspection of unencrypted email traffic if using your own device to connect to corporate network? Fake cell towers if using mobile communications? Don’t use your work email for personal communications?
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My employer issues “free” pretty damned nice cell phones to all providers. Nice perk, except they remain company property and all data exchanges are routinely monitored. I don’t think they listen in on calls, but they certainly review text messages and searches. Excellent reason to go onto my wife’s plan! No clue if Disney does this, but if it’s a company phone, it’s a pretty good bet.
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Wow, that would’ve been nice to have when I had Jr. Kidd. I had to go on short-term disability (only covers 80% of your paycheck) and burn through all my vacation time then a bunch of sick time to make up the difference.
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Yes. And as you say, this kind of thing should be a national standard, as it is in other countries.
This isn’t rocket surgery. 
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If the law were invested in longer term thinking, it would be children as the protected class, and having parents available when needed is in their interests.
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Except it doesn’t really. What it shows is someone who can’t plead a case getting their claims (rightly) dismissed.
He might have had various sustainable claims but he either didn’t bring those claims or where he did, he didn’t assert the necessary facts.
Disney may or may not have treated him badly because of his partner’s pregnancy or because he took parental leave but you couldn’t win a case they way he presented it.
I haven’t been able to find out whether Mr Van Soeren was represented but if he was he needs to have a word with his lawyers because whoever drafted his claims and decided how to run the case did him no favours.
Unless of course what they wanted was a nice headline “US law doesn’t protect men who take parental leave”. In that case, it worked beautifully.
Well, that’s a little unclear. He seems to have claimed that they hacked his home computer - but he didn’t bring a claim for that. He also at some point told them about it. Again not clear when.
It may not be. It’s just not prohibited under the specific statutes he claimed under - although some of the state law claims weren’t actually determined so he might be able to succeed on those.
Except rather oddly, he doesn’t appear to have brought a claim on that basis. He claimed ‘interference’ in his right to parental leave but didn’t claim to have been fired in retaliation for taking it.
It’s really an allround odd case.
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That’s what I thought, too. I would like to learn more, because in addition to the claim of violating NY state law, not allowing someone to take leave incorporated into their employment contract and HR policies is breach of contract. And if requested early enough (say, one month out from expected due date) there is no excuse for the company to do anything other than wish the happy parent-to-be an uneventful birth, healthy child, and relaxing leave.
Story taken at face value, the lawyers for the plaintiff didn’t seem to do a good job defending their client’s interests. (And to be clear, I do not find it hard to believe that Disney Streaming treated this person or any other employee “poorly.”)
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Because of prebirth complications and c-section, I would have been incapable of caring for my child that first week. Having her father there was both a physical and emotional necessity for me. It was an emotional necessity for him. He needed to be there and luckily he was able to. Every father should have that right.
Heavily edited bc the cat helped me hit return before finishing. Damn cat.
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I think the only time HR is vaguely on the side of the employees is when it comes to OSHA complaints. Only because OSHA fines can bankrupt or severely limit a business.
You have to have binders of policies, eye wash stations, bio spill stations, etc. If they come in for an inspection (and they do), you can get your hiney in a twist real fast.
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Paternity / Maternity leave is a good example of where the “old fashioned” universal focus of “labor” is good for all parties! Including LGBTQ parents.
MRAs do too much identity politics, just like white supremacists
I agree with the sentiment of this comment; however, the metaphor ‘serfdom’ is misleading with regard to At-will employment. There is no legally binding agreement keeping either party together as is the case with the definition of a ‘serf’ or ‘indentured servitude’.
On the face of it there seems nothing wrong with “at-will employment”. An employee is free to leave their employer if they wish. And, an employer is not required to suffer working with an employee who is not a good fit for the team or maladjusted; Otherwise not completely incompetent, but insufferable to work with.
Where this becomes problematic is in cases such as this. Was the employee retaliated against, or was an insufferable employee simply let go, presumably after their co-workers realized how much better was the environment at work during their absence. Of course, the new father is possibly out of his fracking mind, and at the limit of their mental processing. Now, they find themselves with a newborn and without work.
And in the context of other employment trends such as precarious employment, loss of social safety net protections, lack of health care options for unemployed Americans, growing inequality, rising home/rent costs–the list goes on–and not getting along with your co-workers suddenly takes on drastic consequences.
This assumes the employer and employee are equally empowered, when generally speaking, they are not, especially in a highly unstable economic market as we are in right now (and have been for the past few years, in fact). At-will laws empower the already powerful. That’s their intended function.
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This. It was worse before the ACA, when an employee couldn’t leave one job before lining up the next just to assure continuity of health insurance. In addition, most companies have dedicated personnel who search for new employees; few employees have dedicated time to search for new jobs.
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There was a short period in the mid-20th century when workers had some leverage against corporations, when unions were relatively strong and wide-spread, and had a seat at the table via the Labor Relations board. Starting with Reagan shit canning all the members of PATCO who refused to back down, that started to really change (although the stagflation of the 70s didn’t help either).
If we want some level of equity with employers, unionization is the primary route to get that. The individual just doesn’t have nearly the leverage that an organized workforce has. It’s a fantasy to believe otherwise. The vast, VAST majority of us are entirely replaceable in what we do, from the point of view of management. We’re replaceable cogs to them, even if we bust our ass and do a great job.
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A strong, honest union presence is called for. Murkans may not recall that before the rise of USA unions, child labor and 72-hour 6-day workweeks and work-related deaths were common, and a ‘vacation’ was the period between employments. Don’t whimper - organize!
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What happens when that’s not the employee; that’s the boss?
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Then people keep quitting until higher management notices and either replaces them with someone horrible in a different way, or, if the boss is also the owner, the business fails.
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So why doesn’t it happen in reality?
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