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Workplace conflict.
What causes it? What best
resolves it?
At GVC Ltd. we focus not just on litigation prevention,
but on dispute-roots identification.
Identify the emotional and psychological seeds of
conflict and your enterprise will have a far more effective
litigation-prevention program than training in legal compliance alone can
provide.
Many -- not all, but many -- workplace lawsuits are
born of worker frustration at not being heard, not out of laws being broken.
Thus, our interdisciplinary approach to
workplace conflict focuses on identifying the root causes of employee unrest --
legal, emotional, interpersonal, and social.
Our approach is guided by the hard-won lessons our founder and
principal, Gwen Carroll, has learned over twenty-eight years of practicing labor
and employment law.
Gwen has counseled, advised, and represented hundreds of employers and
employees -- from Fortune 500 firms to hourly paid workers to tech entrepreneurs
to hospitals to executives to start-ups to non-profits and more.
Her experience on both sides of the table has convinced her that the
phalanx of well-meaning laws intended to improve the workplace often ends up
choking it:
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A
first-line supervisor, exhausted from fielding complaints of illegal conduct
from her team, receives a complaint of “co-worker disability
harassment.” She
responds in a way the employee perceives as defensive and unresponsive. The
conflict escalates, further allegations are made, the employee is fired, and
the dispute finds itself in federal court.
Was the plaintiff
an unrepentant whiner or was he saying something else that might have been
successfully addressed? Could extra-legal
intervention at an early stage have prevented the lawsuit? See
Pierle v. Children’s Museum, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 89110 (S.D. Ind. Nov.
3, 2008).
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A city
administrator suffers from a condition that causes his eyes to wander
involuntarily. His secretary complains that he frequently stares at her
breasts; she believes his behavior constitutes hostile environment sexual
harassment. The employer investigates and finds no sexual harassment. The
secretary commences legal action, the conflict is heard by two federal
courts, and much time, anger, and money is spent on a dispute that the
parties may have been able to resolve had they focused as much on its
psychosocial aspects as its legal.
See
Billings v. Town of Grafton, 515 F.3d 39 (1st Cir. 2008).
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An elegant 65-year-old chief financial officer of a manufacturing employer, upon being
advised that his employment is ending after 30 years of service, vents to
his newly retained counsel: “I
deserved a lunch with the president. If he had just taken me out to lunch
and said, ‘thank you, Ed,’ paid me my severance, and wished me well, I
would not be here in your office. Instead, he has his henchman deliver the
news, I’m told to get out that day -- that day (!) -- and, to add insult
to injury, I’ve got these papers to sign before I can even get one dime of
my severance. I want you to explore every action I may have against the _ _
_ _ _ _ _.”
Composite
Representative Statement heard often in Law Firm
Intake Interviews
It is not enough, we believe, to have a "good
defense” to worker lawsuits. It is better to understand how those lawsuits are
born, to create a workplace environment in which lawsuit protection is not only
a paramount concern but also a happy consequence of deeply embedded core
practices, and to understand as well that, often, the lawsuit is not about
the lawsuit. It is often about anger
(on both sides), a feeling of not having been appreciated (on both sides), and a
feeling of failed quid pro quo (on
both sides).
A
deep understanding of these core human principles, coupled with our longstanding
experience and success in navigating the law of the workplace, drives our
commitment to deliver the highest level of legal, educational, and
conflict-resolution services to our clients.
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