The size of the settlement is based on the expected lifetime earnings of the woman. Bill Reilly targeted many women who had insane career potential.
Also Bill O’Reilly is like 1/10,000 as important as Bill Gates. Bill Gates could write a check for 30MM every day for a year and thanks to stonks be richer at the end of the year than he was at the beginning. All he has to do is beat 8.5% roughly.
HR’s job when you own the company is to pay the tab for your misbehavior.
Depending on the company this may be fracturing of mandates. My employer is large, so our HR is broken into Talent (hiring and training), Rewards (comp and benefits), and HR (all the other stuff).
We have “human capital” which is some how even more demeaning.
Oh for sure, of course people like Gates basically own the country. I mean just general sexual harassment lawsuits. Having to pay someones potential lifetime earnings is still a major hit for most upper management.
Of course billionaires can do whatever they want.
True, we’ve also got a Total Rewards group, but I think they fall under Talent in the structure (not positive). We’re also a large firm so I’m sure it’s more complex than I can see from my client-facing vantage point.
They just showed us this video:
Sounds like they had incentives to push training over punishment. They may have even had goals to meet.
Well, yes.
When I was working at my last place a colleague in the same department (and friend) was upset because the department manager two grades above him had said casually to him, apropos of very little, “I don’t fucking like you”.
My friend’s wife wanted him to go to HR. I spent most of that night in the pub telling him not to be so crazy (the manager was known to be extremely vindictive).
Fortunately he listened and got his reward a few months later when the manager got seconded out to a position in Canada for a couple of years.
But taking that to HR would have been career suicide.
Big organizations, by their nature, create all kinds of perverse incentives. The bosses are, in most organizations, keenly aware that they are “worth” a small fraction of their actual compensation (i.e. nobody else would hire them at their current number). Therefore, their only real job is to keep their job. How do you do that? By kissing ass, taking credit for everything positive, identifying scapegoats for any failures and not giving your most talented underlings any access to the people above you so they might rightly conclude you’re overpaid and unnecessary.
It’s really important to note that most big organizations exist because they do one thing well. Often really well. That one thing + the advantages of being big then carry an almost unbelievable amount of waste and incompetence everywhere else.
If you work for a company but aren’t in the part of the company that justifies the company existing you’re doing it wrong career wise and might be developing legit bad habits that will be hard to kick down the road. I type this knowing that a bunch of you work in tech fields often for non technical companies, and yes I’m telling you to be careful because those places could easily erode your ability to do the same role somewhere else.
Sure but they could have started the paper trail easily a year prior.
I do know they had settled a lawsuit about not paying people OT. Like If you clocked in 7 minutes early or 5 minutes late they just paid you your standard 8 hours.
Everyone at the company got a nice check. Being there 9 months I got about $300
So maybe they were super over compensating. I also know the parent company who bought them out two years prior took over HR.
The cost of just paying someone to do nothing is often lower than the cost of defending a termination, even if justified. It doesn’t take too many 6-figure legal bills before management just decides to stop firing people, instead hoping to make them so miserable they quit. God forbid HR actually does their damn job and documents the reasons for the firing over an extended period of time.
I feel like Fox News pays most of those cases off and it’s likely partially covered by insurance and only a fraction of the money brought in by hosts like that.
So maybe they pay out 10 million to reap 250 million in profits?
Even Harvey Weinstein had a budget for sexual harassment payouts.
Your takes on business are generally directly on target. Commercial banking seems like it would be a good vantage point for learning how stuff actually works.
Some companies seem good at taking these people who hate their jobs and giving them just enough work that no one else wants (but not too much!) and just enough stagnant pay (but not too much!) that everyone is grudgingly satisfied. Just stick them in a corner to do 1 hour of low stakes work per day and forget about them.
Problem here is it made us " full staffed " so we fell WAY behind because we had a bunch of slackers who never showed up lol
I guess this is a hot take, but I think poor employee performance is often indicative of poor management rather than some sort of personal ineptitude. Figuring out strengths and weaknesses of team members and organizing a group in a way to at least mask individual weaknesses (and ideally find everyone a role that uses their strengths) is really fucking hard to do but is basically the only job that middle managers have. If someone is shitting the bed on a regular basis I think it’s on their management to do better. Making it harder to fire people is exactly what we should be doing–don’t let management take the easy way out. Either they do the work to make this person a contributing team member or they do the work to document in ridiculous detail why the person can’t be salvaged.
Ok, but … some people are terrible no matter what role you give them. They take everything personally, find a grievance in everything, and blame everyone else when things go wrong. Good luck getting those people to add value with good middle management. Those employees are hopeless, make everyone else less productive, and consume the manager’s valuable time with their petty nonsense.
I’m sure these people exist but my hypothesis is that they are far less common than just counting “poor performers” would indicate, and that protecting the non-crazies is therefore worth it. I also have a low opinion of the value of managers’ time 
Yeah… going to have to strongly disagree with you here. I don’t think you should have to work to be able to survive with a basic level of dignity. I also would prefer that most low performers went out into the world and found something that they can be part of the good side of the 80/20 principle on.
The low performers time is worth something too. If someone isn’t a good fit for the role they need to get out of the way so that someone new can try out that opportunity. Instead, because they have to ‘work’ to eat, they waste a whole bunch of everyone’s (including themselves) time making other people figure out what they knew months ago… which is that this job isn’t for them and their mission every day is to figure out how to scam one more paycheck while doing as little as possible.
The whole thing reeks of bad incentives and is a huge driver of waste… and I hate waste more than I hate just about anything. My biggest reason for being liberal is that the sheer level of waste I have seen in my life as a direct result of ass backward incentives that are baked into our social system. All of that wasted time could have been used doing literally anything else. It really bothers me to see Donald Trump get to be President and know people better than him in every way (and this is like 1000x better because Donald is a very small man) that caught a charge young and as a result are going to spend the rest of their lives capped at working very hard to be lower middle class. We glory in wasting people’s lives here in the US. Any excuse we can find to exclude someone from doing something important or interesting we take.