Posted on June 25th, 2019
Below is a full transcript of this video.
How’s it going, fellow entrepreneurs? It’s John Fagerholm again from Metal Law Group and today I want to talk about the importance of business owners training their supervisors.
Business owners are strictly liable for whatever the supervisors do. Have a case that we were just finishing up and it was a supervisor that inappropriately touched one of the female workers when she was walking by. It only happened once but it was still inappropriate.
There were witnesses and even though the company took the measures of firing the supervisor for it, it’s still a lawsuit. Because he was a supervisor, there was not even a requirement to complain about it or whatever else.
In this particular situation, the … I’ll just call it groping because I don’t know what else to call it, happened several years ago and nothing happened after that. The employee was fired for cause. I think she created a scene and talked back to the owner or something like that, I don’t remember exactly off the top of my head. She was fired for a particular incident but then she went back and sued the company for that instance of sexual harassment.
Now that particular instance, even though it was only once, and even though it happened several years ago, it was still within the statute of limitations, which is three years.
She was fired then she sued for that particular instance, and who knows what would have happened if it had gone to trial or whatever it was. She never reported it, it seemed like she was playing along with it when it happened, and then she was fired for cause, but still, the client spent thousands upon thousands of dollars defending themselves, even though it ended up settling eventually.
With supervisors, you really need to train them. Not only should they be making sure that the people under them are not doing things like this, the supervisors certainly shouldn’t be doing this.
Because if this had been a non-supervisor and it was the same facts where they were just playing around, it only happened once, and it was several years ago, it may not have been the issue that it was just simply because there is a requirement to report it if it’s a non-supervisor.
But with supervisors, strict liability, it doesn’t even have to be reported.
The moral to the story, train your supervisors.
Thanks, everybody. Until next time.
