Help needed ASAP!

Hailey

I have an employee that was hired in April of this year. We have a points system for attendance in place, however, the Supervisors have approved no points on several occasions for every reason under the sun. Since April she has only worked 2 full weeks and the remainder have been all partial weeks with time missed. She was hired as 2nd shift, and training on 1st. When it was time to go to 2nd she requested a personal leave of absence, which was denied. She then requested 3rd shift, which was also denied. Now she has brought in a doctor slip taking her off work for 2 weeks for a leg injury. We decided to let her go because she does not qualify for FMLA. She then claimed it was a work injury. Later said it was not, then called back and said it was. I don't know what to do with this person, and I can see she is obviously going to be trouble. Can anyone help? I want to make sure we don't end up in a lawsuit.

Thanks,

Hailey

Crout

Were her attendance issues documented and/or addressed with her? If not, this may get tricky, depending on your state laws governing worker's comp. If your state law mandates job protection while injured you may have a problem. Keep in mind that a "doctor's note" is not adequate and your company has the right to get much more detailed information. We use the DOL medical certification for all medical leaves and requests for accommodations.

Don D

This employee is a liability due chiefly to her attendance record. The fact that she is suddenly not available for the shift she trained for is a signal of things to come. The wishi-washiness about whether it's a work injury indicates to me that she is not a truthful person. I agree that if your state comp law is not a job protection statute and if your state has no specific comp retaliation law in place, I would immediately terminate. To the issue of comp retaliation, I would pursue termination if the evidence of her poor attendance and changing comp stories and not moving to her shift all are fully documented. Obviously her termination would have nothing to do with her claiming the injury to be work related. A totally separate issue for me is how in the world those supervisors were able to justify the excusing of all those absences. This should be a topic in future classroom setting where supervisors are given training and company updates!

Sunny

To protect myself, I would also contact my WC Carrier and inform them of the (possible) claim. Then I would insist on the employee providing exact information of how she got hurt and document this on your usual accident investigation form. If she has no good account to make of the accident I would document that too. In other words, get all the information you can documented because you're right, this one is going to be trouble whatever you do. Do you have a policy requiring that employees report all injuries and non-injury incidents immediately to a supervisor? If not, you should probably put one in place. It won't stop all false claims but it will help you control them.

Termination for attendance (or making a false work comp claim) would probably be your best bet. Good luck.

pecohr

I would recommend taking away or at least modifying the Supervisors ability to override your attendenance points system. There should be clear and specific guidelines for what counts as an occurrence and the Supervisors should live to them. Consistancy is very important if you want your program to work. We use a point system here and Supervisors must discuss and get a sign off for HR if they want to not give someone an earned occurrence. We had to do a little babysitting at first but not much anymore.