Employment Laws

Employment Hiring Protections
You are an ambitious Gen Z, “twenty-something” with a You Tube channel, with 1M followers,
a social influencer, and a new TikTok sensation. Your skill is hearing sounds and quickly
mimicking them, such as all the iPhone ring tones, mimicking the old dial up tone, old telephone
rotary dial tones, phone clicks, bird calls, dog barks, cat meows, squeaky doors, rusty gates, and
all sorts of nature sounds. You are a “living sound effects machine.”
You hired a lawyer, a publicist, and other agents, acting on your behalf, signed their respective
retainer documents, and began acting in your best interest. Two years later, after a successful
production and social media campaign, you have managers in a large production division,
making the “hearing sounds” into a phone app, requiring lots of “software development teams”
and other teams necessary to “take the idea” to production, to marketing, to small sales, to large
sales, to a full company, required now to abide by federal and state employment laws, to include
policies and procedures for proper onboarding, training, promoting and outboarding/retiring.
Your Human Relations (HR) Department has recently informed you of “things going on” in one
of the production departments. It seems one of the software development teams, all male, mostly
Caucasian, some South Asian, have the lowest rate of diversity hiring, especially female, over
40, and especially persons with physical disabilities.
HR shows you a stack of excellent resumes, which were all rejected by the one software team, in
question. In fact, the resumes had handwriting on them that disparaged the applicant’s
experience, making jokes about their training, apparent “female sounding name” or another
ethnic name other than South Asian or Caucasian name. They would not know about a person’s
disability, except that some resumes had statements that the applicant would require a TTY
device (Text telephone device), for those that are deaf, hard of hearing or speech impaired.
Moreover, since no resume had a picture and most resumes do not list graduation dates, the team
manager was still able to “do the math” and figure out an applicant’s age, by their work
experience and those that began their software experience in early software languages. Again,
those resumes were well marked up, with disparaging comments.

1. What are the legal issues?
2. What is the best course of action by company leadership?
3. What possible employment law violations has the Software Team Lead, committed, if any?
4. What would you recommend?
   OR
   Option 2 – Labor Law Right to Organize
   Same company as above, but your company have expanded to physical products to complement
   the software “App,” described above. Your hard product division makes stuffed birds “stuffy”
   with recorded bird sounds, sweatshirts and hoodies that have the bird sound embedded into the
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   material, sunglasses that look like birds, hats that “chirp,” shoes that chirp, walking robot birds
   that look and sound like the real bird and other bird motifs. The robot birds are “hot market” just
   like the old cabbage patch dolls, Tyco toys, and other toys.
   Your shipping department does not have enough workers, drivers, shifts, and you are paying lots
   of overtime, with weekend and holiday “double pay and holiday pay.” It is getting almost
   impossible to “meet the delivery schedule,” and the attrition rate is now at 40%, within 6 weeks,
   50% within 6 months, 75% within 1 year and 100% at 2 years. The alleged “grind is a killer,”
   and the remaining “old timers” those with three years or more with the company are threatening
   to “walk off” the job, even though their act is illegal. They are not unionized, and the company is
   in a “Right to Work State,” where new hires are not required to join a Union, nor required to pay
   union dues, if a facility is unionized.
   However, there is enough interest in the facility to unionize, as a way to raise salaries, limit
   ordered overtime pay, stop extra ordered shifts and basically the “employees to have a seat at the
   table.” One of the veterans has taken on the role as the “union organizer” and is getting
   “unionization” advice from a union officer from another state. The veteran is calling for a Union
   “Yes or No” vote. The entire facility knows of this impending action. Company management
   does not want the facility to unionize, fearing loss of employee control, higher wages, better
   benefits, and overall “employee participation in company decisions.”
   Management has even gone as far as talking to shift leaders, telling them to discourage
   employees from even participating in the vote, much less voting Yes. The shift leaders say they
   “have been given the green light” to do “things” to “dissuade” employees from unionizing.
5. What are the legal issues?
6. What is the best course of action by company leadership?
7. What possible labor law violations have management and shift leaders committed, if any?
8. What would you recommend?
   INSTRUCTIONS
   For this Employment Case Law Scenario Assignment, the student will write at least 1600 words,
   but not more than 1800 words and a biblical integration section, with a verse. The student must
   support their assertions with at least three scholarly citations in current APA format. Any sources
   cited must have been published within the last five years. Acceptable sources include the
   textbook, provided articles, video, the Bible, and other scholarly sources.