TexasCHLforum.com

There is exactly one case of a pistol discharging because of the magnetic field of an MRI machine. It happened New York in the 1990s and has been discussed on "gun boards" for a decade.

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- Jim

GEM-Texas wrote:But if you search legal journals, you will find several law review articles that suggest the company will be liable for actions of their employees with guns (carried legally or in the car) or customers allowed to carry guns.

That is true.

However, they cannot find solid evidence that companies that lack a no-weapons policy or allow their employees to have weapons on company premises incur greater liability (that is, get sued or lose more often or lose bigger amounts) than those that have such policies.

In reality, nearly every workplace shooting results in lawsuits. The courts hold in general that employers or property owners are not responsible for the random acts of criminals. This is true even for jobs like pizza delivery, where robberies are frequent. The injured parties occasionally win such lawsuits because of real negligence by the company (ignoring threats, usually).

It also defies logic to think that a person who plans to "go postal" and commit murder (and often suicide) is going to be deterred by a company rule that might get him fired. However, this goes back to my earlier point about bureaucracies having a stubborn thread of mindless stupidity.

- Jim

Dave2 wrote:If the point of an employee handbook is to make a "one size fits all" set of rules that complies with all laws and regulations in every location that the company does business, it's hopeless.

That's not necessarily the goal.

Large companies that have multiple locations in multiple states or countries have local versions of policy manuals. I think in the case of my employer there is one manual for California, one for the other states, and other versions for other countries (which I don't deal with).

There are places in the policy manual where it says, essentially, "consult with the legal department on this issue," because there is no one-size-fits-all policy.

The people who deal with complicated issues like international procurement are specialists. An employee or manager who is not qualified in that area is not allowed to do anything on his own initiative. (There are stories in business publications about stupid blunders in this area by people who don't know what they are doing.)

If the company policy violates some obscure combination of laws, the individual employees are protected from prosecution by following company policy in good faith. I'm not talking about obvious violations like fraud. I'm talking about the stuff like record-keeping and reporting that are always debatable.

- Jim

Dave2 wrote:How about including a copy of the <state> penal code at the end and a note saying "follow these"?

That's not good enough, either.

We can't agree on this forum about the meaning of individual words in the penal code. Neither can supreme court justices. Nobody really understands the whole thing.

The state penal code does not include everything that is potentially illegal. There's the Labor Code and Tax Code. If your company owns vehicles, you run into the Transportation Code. If it is in a regulated industry such as insurance, medicine, or alcoholic beverages, you have to deal with those codes.

Then there is federal law. If you do business overseas (which is more and more common these days) you have to deal with the laws of other countries and treaties like NAFTA that regulate international trade.

You can't hire either minimum-wage workers with limited education or specialized professionals and expect them to understand all that. You certainly would not want to pay them for the time it took to read all the codes.

- Jim

Dave2 wrote:Which is why I said "Don't do anything illegal on company time or property", and "you'd better have a really good explanation if you give someone a reason to sue us ..."

That's not sufficient. This isn't my idea. There is plenty of legal precedent for employers being held responsible for failing to properly train and manage employees.

This is often the case with sexual harassment. The employer has been held liable many times for failing to make some effort to deal with it. (BTW, I happen to think that sexual harassment charges sometimes are bogus, but often they are legitimate.)

In the end the employer on the losing end of a lawsuit will be paying the legal fees and megabucks in settlements. The employee generally has no assets worth suing for.

- Jim

Dave2 wrote:What compels companies to have policies on every topic, conceivable or otherwise?

• It's what bureaucracies do.
• Many actions—thousands in certain industries—are legally required or prohibited by multiple levels of government. Companies are assumed to know and conform to the law. It would be risky and a huge waste of resources to have every middle manager trying to learn and interpret the law.
• It protects managers from having to think through every situation and possibly treating employees inconsistently and unfairly.
  
  I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where the boss ate lunch and socialized after work with certain employees other than yourself, and it seemed like those employees got away with things that you couldn't.

• It gives the company a rational basis for firing people, without having to pay unemployment or be sued for wrongful termination.

The problem with illegal actions or actions that result in lawsuits is that employees are considered "servants" of their employer, and the employer is responsible for nearly everything employees do in the course of their employment.

- Jim

JKTex wrote:"My employer forces me" isn't accurate, "I let my employer make me" is more like it.

I agree completely with that.

In fact, people excuse their actions by saying "I had no choice" all the time, when they did have a choice. No adult can be forced to do anything unless by three or four muscular goons moving him around like a mannequin.

What people really mean is that they choose the course of action that is least painful for themselves.

I have a skill set that I can use most effectively in a corporate environment. I earn a comfortable income doing that. I choose to abide by the rules that my employer sets.

I could be self-employed and have been. I did not earn nearly as much income doing that, and I found it frustrating.

BTW, every single U.S. congressman and senator is an employee of the federal government and works in a federal facility where weapons, smoking, and other activities are restricted—though they can still legally commit sexual harassment. Most live in or travel through the District of Columbia, where they cannot legally possess a firearm outside their residence.

- Jim

In my experience, that is generally true. I used to work with a guy who literally smelled like pot all the time. He did his job like a finely tuned machine, and nobody said a word about it. I've also worked with people who probably had alcohol or other drug problems but kept the issue discreet.

However, sexual harassment is pretty much suicide. It can cost the company too much money to be tolerated.

I suspect the employee firearms in parking lots issue will be no big deal in a year or so. But as I said previously, some management organizations will continue to be stupid because that's what they do best.

- Jim

JKTex wrote:And who says an employer can search your car whenever they want? How do they know what is in your car and why would you allow them to search it?

If you work for a large company—larger than a single-owner business—they probably will "request" that you sign a statement of policy as a condition of employment. I say "request" in quotation marks because if you decline the request, they don't hire you.

If the company has a closed campus with employee parking on the campus, it most likely will include a statement that the management can demand to search your car, and refusing is grounds for immediate dismissal.

I have worked for three large companies at five locations, all of which had this kind of provision. All were surrounded by highways and had no place to park off-campus. Parking off-campus and walking to the office or plant would have involved at least a half-mile walk and made the person doing it very obvious to security personnel.

Companies that perform these searches usually do so because of suspicion of drug or alcohol use or theft. Sometimes these suspicions are valid. Sometimes they are based on rumors spread by malicious coworkers. Sometimes they are based on an employee running his mouth—which some people seemingly cannot resist.

If that's not enough, they can call the cops and get out the "drug-sniffing" dogs. Then they have probable cause for a LEO to search your car.

If an employer feels they have that power, what else will you let them do to you?

• no smoking—including in some cases outside of work
• random drug tests
• no consumption of alcohol
• no romantic relationships with other employees
• no personal phone calls on company time—including on your personally owned mobile phone
• no personal e-mail or web surfing on the company network
• no personal business on company time or while using a company-owned vehicle
• wearing an ugly uniform and other dress codes
• using required safety equipment

There's an old saying, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

- Jim

Anyone who works for a large corporation can be fired for violating some policy. People have been fired for making a single personal phone call or sending or receiving a single personal e-mail on a company-owned phone or computer.

Also, I don't know what anyone expects to get from a wrongful termination suit, even if such a suit could be won.

Monetary damages from wrongful termination lawsuits usually involve federal law, which is not the case here.

Forcing an employer who fired you to reinstate you does not sound like the path to a long, satifying career; and that kind of episode tends to become baggage even if employers do not disclose it in a traceable way.

- Jim

Very few people worry about these issues.

The problem is that some of them are in the right position to make a fuss. That includes some in academia, corporate HR and legal departments, and the media.

- Jim

GEM-Texas wrote:In fact, schools' inaction in case of the warning signs from rampagers can be traced back to liability concerns. If they wouldn't act strongly against obviously disturbed folks suggests that they wouldn't be hot to go after law abiding folks with clean records.

The problem with "disturbed" students is that few of them have done anything that meets the strict standards of mental incompetence or criminal guilt.

In fact, it's almost necessary for the person to commit a serious crime before being found incompetent. This was exactly the case with Loughner.

Also their medical records are protected by privacy laws and concern with slander or libel suits.

Schools are perfectly happy to throw out students and employees who are found with weapons. They just don't look very hard.

- Jim

I wish I could be so optimistic.

In 2002 at a Weyerhauser plant in Oklahoma, the company management ordered a police search of employee vehicles for drugs. No drugs were found, but about a dozen employees were fired when firearms were found in their vehicles. All the employees weapons legally, either handguns with permits or hunting weapons.

Subsequently the state legislature passed an employee parking-lot law like the one under discussion here.

Weyerhauser, ConocoPhillips, and Williams Cos. filed suit to void the law. They won in the first round, but eventually the law was upheld in 2009.

These companies probably spent millions in legal fees to overturn the law. They produced a valuable federal court ruling that allowing employees to have firearms in their own vehicles is not within the scope of OSHA regulations (which was the basis of the suit).

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This ruling directly affects only the 10th circuit (that is, not Texas), but it serves as a precedent for suits that may be filed in other circuits.

Along the way, the NRA promoted a boycott against ConocoPhillips. This boycott was nationwide news in 2005. ConocoPhillips did not change its course of action or suffer any detectable loss of business.

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The entire story of this episode has not been told in one place.

Now for my opinion:

The management of many companies is stupid. It is a huge, blind beast that continues to do what it has always done because it has always done it that way. They do not always make decisions that result in long-term profitability. That is why so many of the formerly great companies of the 20th century either no longer exist or reduced to brand names owned by someone else.

They also are afraid of their own employees—usually with good reason.

As for Texas being conservative, keep in mind that many of these large companies are run by MBAs and lawyers in some other state or country.

- Jim