Posted by:
MCR
(
)
Date: March 20, 2015 10:03AM
Yeah, kind of. If I have to guess at why Utah workers are "disengaged," I would say the attitude of managers and owners has a lot to do with it. Utah is very entreprenuiral, but many owners and managers, especially younger ones, think of workers as pieces of furniture or something and resent even the most minimal labor laws. And investors can be predatory as well, so owning a business isn't necessarily the solution.
I just read a unemployment insurance law case. It involved one of the many of the Utah faux-contractors. Utah companies pretend their employees are "independent contractors" even though legally they're not, so the employer doesn't have to match FICA or medicare, nor pay unemployment insurance premiums. This forces the employee to pay 100% of their payroll taxes, contrary to law, and it leaves the employee wholly unprotected when they're laid off.
In this particular case, a business owner's got a neighbor who's a fulltime teacher. The business owner persuades the teacher to come work for him. She does, and the owner sets her up in a home office, calls her--and all her co-workers--independent contractors, provides her with software and procedures, and she becomes basically a sales-rep for a website/marketing company. She works for around four years, then receives a chirpy email telling her how wonderful she is, but the business hasn't got enough clients to keep her employed, so the company's regretfully letting her go, but if business picks up, she can come back, oh, and would she mind hanging around for another two weeks on an as-needed basis to help them out tying up loose ends?
In the middle of the two weeks, the company locks her out, and she applies for unemployment benefits because she's been laid off. Then Whoa, Nelly! The company fights back against her claim. And I mean fights back hard! The company loses two separate decisions. Unemployment determines, by the way she works, that she's not a contractor, she's an employee (and it's obvious what the company's trying to do to circumvent the law). Unemployment also determines, by the letter alone, that she was laid off. The company loses at the Division level, it loses at the Board level, but it takes the case to the appellate court, and loses there.
But the slander this woman had to endure from her employer in order to get unemployment benefits! This guy, this neighbor, who approached her to give her a job, and convinces her to take it, attacks her in order to win a court case and deny her a cushion to pay her mortgage and buy groceries after he lays her off! The employer fought hard to perserve the phony contractor status then fought hard to prove that she was fired for cause. The company's position was that most of the entire four or so years she worked for the company she was a thorn in their side, on the verge of being fired. They reached back two years to some incident to find something she'd done wrong. Then they had to build a case forward to explain why there was not one official bad report or performance evaluation documenting "cause." Without any documentation, or a history of work deficieny, the company went for straight slander against her. Suddenly the woman hears all this evidence from her employer about how she's been a crap employee and has been hated for four years! I can't imagine the stress that woman was under being slandered and bad-mouthed like that. The company even gathered witnesses to slander her too.
And this was in an open and shut case that lost in a summary fashion, in three courts. Yet the company fought every single point in order to avoid paying the unemployment insurance premiums every honest business person pays.
Yeah, Utah's workers are disengaged. Do you want to be torn apart by your neighbor after working for him for four years?