If you don’t like your boss, Barack Obama’s administration wants YOU to sue their asses. That’s right – if you don’t like your boss, they’ll even set you up with a lawyer on a contingency basis. They describe this as part of their “Middle Class Initiative.”
Here are the details courtesy of Fox news.
http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/02/04/white-house-launches-new-aba-hotline-labor-dept/
That Barack Obama would support such a thoroughly ridiculous policy is very revealing. First, it embraces that the employee/manager relationship is inherently adversarial. This notion is the fundamental assumption of Marxism – the dialectic between those who control the means of production against those who do the producing.
According to Labor Department statistics, over 40,000 employees call each year with gripes about their bosses but because of budget constraints (in Obama language that means the government is not spending enough money) only 10% receive service. Thus the administration is working with the American Bar Association (ABA) to provide a toll-free number to connect the grievous workers with lawyers where typical issues supposedly often deal with minimum wage, overtime, and family medical leave. The administration’s pitch states, “a new effort between the federal government and private bar to assist complainants who may need help with worker rights.”
The absurdity of this system is beyond belief. For all the pressures put on business by government mandate which especially hit hard on small businesses on tight margins struggling to survive, this confrontational legalistic Marxist approach, introduces the high probability of frivolous lawsuits which no matter how lacking in merit can still run up tremendous expenses in legal fees in defense of such idiocy. The history of this administration has thrown some lip service to the plight of small businesses but in reality nails them to the wall such as working to comply with Obama “care.” For the world of organized labor, such provisions of how to handle such disputes are handled by the labor bureaucracy while such companies have legal departments for the explicit purpose of dealing with such assaults. With this in mind, this law clearly targets non-union shops and where are most of the non-union shops – among the ranks of small to medium businesses. Even before the Obama administration, no Federal department has more lawyers other than the Justice Department than the Department of Labor.
Clearly most employee/management disputes are communication problems. Only in the rarest instances are employers purposely or knowingly acting illegally against their employees. Often employees might feel ill-prepared to address their supervisors, not know what to say, or simply have an attitude which translates into blame against their bosses. Larger companies have human relations staffs which help provide a nonthreatening stage which helps provide constructive intervention.
The bottom line is if workers feel they are being treated unfairly, it is there responsibility to put up or shut up. The tough question is are they truly committed to doing what’s expected of them or are they looking for loopholes to leach off of their employers because they do not possess positive attitudes toward work and have personal values with a strong work ethic.
Employees who are not being paid minimum wage, do not receive overtime, or are forced to do things that are contrary to labor law surely deserve justice. Perhaps some stage of mediation would be appropriate. Often it would simply be clarifying to the employee or maybe the employer what the appropriate guidelines are. To immediately call out the heavy artillery of the legal system is a dreadful overreach, Marxist philosophy in its most basic form.
So if this were necessary, how about this? If the employee loses his case, then he will be held responsible for reimbursing his employer for the employer's legal fees and time spent in preparation for the initiated legal proceedings? The possibility of abuse and frivolous lawsuits cannot be underestimated.
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